A sustainable solution to India’s fertilizer woes lies in urea decontrol and giving subsidy directly to farmers. Explain
Refer - Financial Express
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 3 years
KEY POINTS
· The Centre is working on a plan to cap the number of subsidised fertiliser bags that individual farmers can buy in any cropping season. Currently, anybody, non-farmers included, can buy fertiliser through the PoS mode (they only need to furnish their Aadhaar unique identity number).
· The government suspects that a lot of black marketing is happening at this level, and believes it can be curbed by implementing its latest plan, as purchase above the cap will have to be at unsubsidised/full price.
· Currently, there is excessive use of urea—a dominant source of ‘N’—vis-à-vis complex fertilisers such as diammonium phosphate (DAP), the main source of ‘P’, and muriate of potash (MOP), the main source of ‘K’.
· This has led to increasing imbalance in the NPK-use ratio. On an all-India basis, currently, this ratio is 6.7:2.4:1 against the ideal of 4:2:1, with consequent adverse effects on crop yield, soil and human health.
· The lack of any progress on the goal set by the PM has a lot to do with archaic policies that are completely divorced from contemporary realities but continue to be pursued by bureaucrats working in silos.
· The Union government controls the MRP of urea—set at a low level, without any relation to the cost of production and distribution. Manufacturers get reimbursed for the shortfall in realisation from sales via the subsidy on a ‘unit-specific’ basis under the new pricing scheme (NPS).
· In the past, many committees had recommended that the policy dispensation for urea be brought on a par with that for P and K fertilisers—the last such recommendation was given by a committee under the chairmanship of then agriculture minister Sharad Pawar (2012).
vivek attri 4 years
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Venkateshwaran R 4 years
Kindly provide Feedback. Thank you
