Doubling Farmers’ Income is a flagship initiative by the Government of India aimed at improving the economic well-being of farmers. It focuses on increasing agricultural productivity, reducing costs, ensuring fair prices, and diversifying income sources.

• Doubling farmers' income is a government initiative aimed at increasing the income of farmers in India.
• Goal - to double the income of farmers by 2022, which is the 75th year of India's independence. 
• Objective -The objective is to ensure that farmers get a fair price for their produce and are able to earn a sustainable income from farming.

Key Drivers for Doubling Farmers' Income

The major sources of growth operating within agriculture sector are:

• improvement in productivity
• resource use efficiency or saving in cost of production
• increase in cropping intensity
• diversification towards high value crops

Sources outside Agriculture 

• shifting cultivators from farm to non-farm occupation.
• Improvement in terms of trade for farmers.

Strategy for Doubling Farmers' Income

The premise of the strategy for doubling farmers income is based on the following primary principles:

• Increasing total output across the agricultural sub-sectors through realising higher productivity.
• Rationalizing/reducing the cost of production.
• Ensuring remunerative prices in the agricultural produce.
• Effective risk management.
• Adoption of sustainable technologies.

Why Doubling Farmers' Income is Crucial

From self-sufficient food production to self-sufficient farmer -

• Past strategy for development of the agriculture sector in India has focused primarily on raising agricultural output and improving food security. 
• The net result has been a 45 per cent increase in per person food production, which has made India not only food self-sufficient at aggregate level, but also a net food exporting country.
• Strategy to promote farmers welfare-
• Farmer poverty, Reason of agrarian distress, Low farm investment

Challenges in Doubling Farmers' Income

• Poor infrastructure-with inadequate irrigation facilities, storage structure, transportation network results in low return to farmer.
• Fragmentation of land- 86% of India's farmer are small farmers which ask difficult to scale up the operation.
• Agriculture policies issue- sometimes policies adopted by government are in support of trade and opening market which hurt Farmer
• Low productivity - low productivity of agriculture compared with other countries.
• Lack of institutional support ,Dependency on monsoon, Climate change, Price fluctuations 

Way forward

• The Dalwai Committee in Doubling the Farmers income had recommended substaintial reforms in Marketing structure including reforms in APMCs, and placing agricultural marketing in the Concurrent list
• Aligning policies-eg. greater procurement of millets instead of cereal centric procurement will help to increase income.
• Crop diversification - including high value crop which increase farmers income 
• Technological innovation - to increase productivity and profitability.
• Extention -to provide farmers with information regarding adoption of new technology.
• Food processing industries - will help farmers to decrease post handling loss and assured prices of products.
• Integrated farming systems- such as beekeeping, apiculture , sericulture etc.
• Promotion of FPOs- for better risk management and greater bargaining power.
• Diverting the excess manforce - would help to reduce burden on agriculture.

Government Initiatives Supporting Doubling Farmers' Income Income support to farmers through PM KISAN. Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY). Institutional credit for agriculture sector-Increased from Rs. 8.5 lakh crore in 2015-16 with a target to reach Rs. 18.5 lakh crore in 2022-23. Fixing of Minimum Support Price (MSP) at one-and-a half times the cost of production Micro Irrigation Fund of Rs 5000 crore has been created with NABARD. Promotion of Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs).

It is apparent that income earned by a farmer from agriculture is crucial to address agrarian distress (Chand 2016) and promote farmers welfare. In this background, the goal set to double farmers' income by 2022-23 is central to promote farmers welfare, reduce agrarian distress and bring parity between income of farmers and those working in non-agricultural professions.