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| Dying agriculture sector crying for help | | | early times report
SRINAGAR, Feb 5: In Jammu and Kashmir, the agricultural sector is constantly performing poorly with respect to its contribution to the SGDP and adds to it the unregulated use of fertile and agriculture land.
Resorting of small owners to arbitrary change in land use and the encroachment of vast swathes of state land by land mafias with a big mafia-politicians-police-bureaucratic-nexus has resulted into big problems for the state. There have been a few attempts by the various governments to come up with policies with regard to the encroached land.
In 1996 when NC formed the government, it devised a policy that the encroached lands would be sold to the illegal occupants on market rate and the proceeds will fetch Rs 20,000 crores corpus for investment in energy. However, Ghulam Nabi Azad led PDP-Congress government reversed the policy and doled 1765117 kanals (88255.85 hectors) of state land to 256844 individuals in a questionable measure.
The other thing that contributes to the worsening of the agriculture is the housing sector. By December 2011 when the overall exposure of banks in J&K was of the order of Rs 18704.11 crores, the housing sector alone stood at Rs 5524.78 crores. Most of it goes into land purchases. However, the fact that Jammu and Kashmir has a small landholding pattern makes the situation very tight one for the state. The average land holding in state is 0.73 hectare. The only state in India with lesser land holding than Jammu and Kashmir is Kerala. As small holding become non-remunerative, the owners resort to arbitrary change in the land use. In 2011, the then revenue ministry identified the illegal land use over 357306 kanals (17865.3 hectors) of agricultural land across the state. Most of this conversion feeds the housing sector.
With the budget session less than a month away the sector puts a huge challenge on the government and it needs to be seen as to what measures the state government will come up with to improve the steady declining contribution of agriculture to SGDP.
From 2004-05 to 2011-12 a steady decline in the percentage of contribution of Agriculture and allied activities from 28.06 percent to 19.36 percent was recorded which reflected an average annual decline of about 1.24 percent.
During the year 2012-13 the situation remained by and large the same. though government had proposed a piece of legislation, "prohibition of conversion of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes", however, the bill was referred to a select committee in 2010 and the select committee has exhausted all the three extensions but failed to give its recommendations and evolve a consensus on how to make changes in the proposed legislation. Now all eyes are on the forthcoming budget session on how serious the issue is settled as far as blanket ban on conversion of agricultural land for non agriculture purpose is concerned. |
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