Yes, because of the Finance Minister’s commitment to ensuring ‘more inclusive growth’ and to seeing that the benefits are more equitably distributed. Stepping up public investment in agriculture is one of the key measures to boost the farm sector. Targeted higher flow of credit, increase in gross capital formation, emphasis on water resources management and higher outlay on irrigation are sure to strengthen the production base. But it must be conceded that these measures may not entirely eliminate the difficulties associated with farming, on which depends the livelihood of over 100 million farm families. What can go wrong? Even in the past, substantial outlays have been committed to various crop production and irrigation schemes; but lack of transparency in project implementation, cost and time overruns and general absence of accountability for delays or failures have meant that a lot of money may have gone down the drain, so to say.

This time, fortunately, the Finance Minister has gone beyond just making allocations. He has promised to put in place a system of monitoring and evaluation of projects and accounting for large sums of money spent, by setting up the Central Plan Schemes Monitoring System to be implemented by the Planning Commission. The new system, overdue as it is, must also try to fix accountability and responsibility on key officials for project implementation. It is imperative the State governments are kept in the loop as they implement many of the Centrally-sponsored programmes. It may be naïve to assume, though, that higher flow of farm credit or increased allocation of irrigation projects, in themselves, will bring about a transformation. Input management, improved agronomy, better rural infrastructure and market access too are critical components of a successful farm growth strategy. Production or supply-side uncertainties continue to impact availability and prices. In the short term, there is little the Budget can hope to achieve in controlling food inflation. While the Finance Minister has sought to check leakages in the public distribution system by attempting to experiment with ‘smart’ cards, he has missed an opportunity to support the really poor and needy by including edible oil and pulses in the distribution system at subsidised rates.

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