The government plans state- and district-specific agricultural strategies to increase farm yield.
The proposal, discussed at a meeting of the full Planning Commission headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is aimed at increasing farm growth to 4 per cent annually in the coming years.
The prime minister and Finance Minister P Chidambaram also called on state governments to ramp up expenditure on agriculture to at least 6 per cent of their annual spend during the 11th Five Year Plan period 2007-12.
The Centre is concerned over the decline in agriculture spending by states, which in recent years has fallen from a low level of 5 per cent of total state government expenditure to 3.5 per cent.
A national consensus on this will be forged at the forthcoming meeting of the National Development Council on May 29.
"I had directed the Planning Commission to work with the ministry of agriculture and come up with specific proposals to promote state-specific agricultural strategies and ways of incentivising adoption of such strategies," Singh said in his inaugural address at the meeting, which discussed a report of the National Development Council sub-committee on agriculture.
Singh also raised concern over increasing fertiliser subsidy. "The manner in which the fertiliser subsidy is ballooning is a cause for concern. In addition to the fiscal sustainability of such a subsidy in the long term, we need to see whether such a subsidy is delivering the outcomes we desire," he said.
In his intervention at the meeting, Chidambaram said: "Since many schemes are operationally stand-alone schemes administered by different ministries and departments, it is difficult to see how they fit into a co-ordinated strategy either at the national level or the state level. The better approach would be to evolve state-specific schemes, aggregate them and then fit them into operational schemes".
Chidambaram also said that he was open to raising another Rs 7,000 crore (Rs 70 billion) for spending but wanted that the Planning Commission allocate the bulk of these resources to agriculture and allied activities. He also questioned the Plan panel.