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To enhance agricultural yields, quality seeds are most essential. In India, farmers are still struggling to get quality seeds because there is no encouragement for seed companies to invest in seed research.
To promote seed research, seed companies should be given a status of infrastructure companies and the income of seed companies should be treated as agricultural income. Finance extended to seed companies should be treated as priority sector lending by the banks.
The Government is extending various subsidies for distribution of oil-seeds, pulses seeds, hybrid paddy seeds, and so on, but only to government-owned seed corporations. This makes private seed companies uncompetitive.
Hence, private seed companies are not investing the required and desirable resources into this segment, because of which, productivity is stagnant in these crops. Agriculture being crucial to ensuring the nation's food security, such subsidies should be extended to private seed companies also.
Price deregulation, particularly in cotton, is essential; otherwise, new technologies will not come into India as there is no price differentiation between good and bad.
(The author is Managing Director, Krishidhan Seeds.)
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