Ashok Dalwai Committee

The Union Government constituted an inter-ministerial committee headed by Ashok Dalwai to suggest measures to create favourable investment climate in the Indian agriculture sector and to realize the vision of doubling farmer’s income by 2022. Some of the major recommendations of the committee include-

• Placing agricultural marketing in the Concurrent list to realize the vision of eNAM.
• Greater private sector participation in agro-marketing and logistics sector.
• Promote state level agricultural reforms like creation of better physical infrastructure, improved price dissemination campaigns and reform regulations that force farmers to sell their agricultural produce to specific mandis creating monopolies.
• Farmer producer and village producer organisations (FPO/VPO) should help integrate small and marginal farmers into agricultural market system.
• Roll out the Model Agricultural Produce and Livestock Marketing(APLM) Rules
• Promote market reforms and investment in infrastructure for cold-chain integration to reduce post-harvest losses.
• Step up institutional credit on a monumental scale.
• Focus primarily on agricultural exports with the aim to raise agricultural export by three times by 2022-23.
• The report suggested setting up of a permanent inter-ministerial committee, including commerce, consumer affairs and agriculture. This would help monitor domestic and global agricultural prices and recommend necessary policy changes at the ground level.