India pledged to spend US$5.2 billion dollars to double the income of struggling farmers and also boost a rural employment scheme as it unveiled its annual budget on Monday under pressure to balance much-needed spending with fiscal prudence.
India is now the world’s fastest-growing major economy, but years of drought and a failure to create jobs for a burgeoning young population has left millions of rural Indians struggling and led to deadly protests in recent weeks.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said India’s estimated 120 million farmers were the “backbone of the country’s food security” as he pledged to spend 359 billion rupees (US$5.2 billion) on the country’s vast agriculture sector.
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“We need ... to give back to our farmers a sense of income security,” Jaitley told parliament as he presented the budget in parliament.
The initiative would increase the income of farmers over the next five years through a series of measures including boosting a crop insurance scheme, increasing access to markets and a massive injection of funding to village councils.
That includes a major hike in spending on a rural employment scheme introduced under the last government and a pledge to ensure all the country’s villages have electricity within two years.