PMK founder S Ramadoss released his party’s shadow budget for agriculture on Sunday, emphasising on establishing more agricultural institutions, creation of storage infrastructure and technical upskilling of farmers.
Releasing the budget report, Ramadoss said that this year PMK has given 281 suggestions pertaining to 75 aspects for agriculture development.
“Instead of taking these as PMK’s ideas, the state government should consider them as demands by farmers and include the possible ones in the state government’s first agriculture budget to be tabled in July.
Our request is that these proposals should eventually be implemented,” Ramadoss said.
PMK has been releasing agri budgets, a set of proposals, for the past 13 years and this is the 14th.
In this budget, PMK has underlined the need for cold storage facilities in all taluks, food processing units in all districts, mega warehouses to store paddy procured from farmers, setting up of three more agri universities, one agri college for every four districts and establishing a rice technology park in Thanjavur.
This apart, a horticulture university at Karumandhurai in Salem, a sericulurture college in Hosur and a research centre for tomato and plantain crops at Mecheri in Salem were part of the budget.
The budget spoke of creating 50 lakh employments in agriculture and horticulture.
One of the proposals is creating consultation centres in villages comprising agriculrure and engineering graduates who would provide suggestions and service for marketing agro products.
While neera would be tapped, self-help groups shall be involved in rearing goat, chicken and turkeys while they shall run hotels serving these non- vegetarian food.
PMK also underlined the importance of river linking projects and swifter implementation of agro-infrastructure projects like Avinashi- Athikadavu scheme.