Krishi Mahotsav - 2012

Chief Minister talks to 1 lakh farmers across Gujarat through videoconferencing

CM says, Krishi Mahotsav is the world’s biggest university that imparts knowledge of scientific farming in open farms, sitting under trees.

Narendra Modi holds talk with around one lakh farmers and cattle-breeders every evening through video conference from Gandhinagar as a part of month-long Krishi Mahotsav.

Speaking about the challenges against the agriculture sector of the country the Chief Minister said that agricultural land has been decreasing due to the increase in population. “When the demand for farm output increases, the best way to meet the demand, is to increase the production. The farm produce per acre of land and the milk production per animal must be increased”, he said.

Comparing India’s agriculture sector with that of China’s Mr. Modi said that China has 13 million hectare of land while India has 161 million hectare. Even though the farmers in China are getting three times more produce than their Indian counterparts. China is far ahead from India with 1.5 times more production of rice and cotton. India needs to change its traditional way of farming in order to increase productivity, he said.

Gujarat government is continually expanding the scope of training for scientific farming. This has led many progressive farmers to get great results. Even the women has now joined the overall momentum in agriculture sector and earned prestige for Gujarat in value-added farming, Narendra Modi said.

With the changing of time the farmers are needed to change the way they do farming. They should learn to understand the market moods and adopt scientific methods. “Even on a small piece of land the marginal farmers can get high yield with greenhouse and net house methods”, he said.

Chief Minister Narendra Modi said the state government has opened Krishi Vigyan Kendra in every district and is giving soil health card to help farmers getting more productivity from their land. With a view to promote scientific farming the state has given training to 2.5 lakh farmers and eight new agriculture colleges are going to be set up.

During the next Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors’ Summit in 2013 the state government will give high importance to the development in agriculture sector, he said.