FM Nirmala Sitharaman announced the third tranche of the proposed Rs 20,000 lakh crore economic package on Friday. This installment focuses on providing relief to the agriculture sector and allied industries giving more impetus to infrastructure and building capacities.
She started by saying that in the last two months of the lockdown, several measures had been put in place to support farmers in addition to the Minimum Support Price (MSP) purchases of Rs 73,300 crores. The FM added in the third tranche that Rs 18,700 crores have been utilised for the PM Kisan Fund transfers and Rs 6,400 crore has been used for crop insurance payments.
An extra 111 crore litres of milk was purchased providing a payment of Rs 4,100 crore and a new scheme to provide interest subvention of 2% per annum to dairy cooperative has been implemented. The interest subvention will unlock Rs 5,000 crore additional liquidity, benefitting 2 crore farmers.
PM Modi had announced a Rs 20,000 lakh crore economic package to breathe life back into the economy that has taken a hit due to the nationwide lockdown because of the global COVID-19 pandemic. This included an initial package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore for free foodgrain and cash to poor for three months announced in March, and Rs 5.6 lakh crore stimulus provided through various monetary policy measures by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
The remaining amount is to be announced in 5 different tranches of which the government has made two tranches of announcements with a cumulative package of Rs 9.1 lakh crore, comprising largely of credit lines to smaller firms, concessional credit to farmers and support to shadow banking and electricity distributors.
