Nashik: Farmers from the district want the central government to have a separate budget for agriculture just like the railway budget.The farmers also want the Centre to set up separate funds for farmers in line with the Price Stability Funds. The reactions from farmers come ahead of the union budget for the financial year 2019-20 that will be presented on February 1.“We want separate agricultural budget in the interest of the farmers that will offer a price to the produce that will be one-and-a-half time more than the production cost,” Kuber Jadhav, an onion farmer, said.“Water is a major issue for the farmers as farming is not possible without it . Hence, the government should undertake a new river-linking project across the country connecting all the major rivers right from Ganga, Godavari, Tapi to Narmada for making water available to the farmers,” he added.Nivrutti Nyaharkar, another farmer, said that there is a need to create special corpus for farmers that will be used when the price of agriculture produce goes below the production cost.“If the Centre can set up Price Stability Funds for onion and potatoes in the interest of consumers so that they get produce at moderate rates. Similarly, we also want the government to set up funds in the interest of farmers,” he said.Nyaharkar added that there is still no mechanism that will provide authentic statistics about the acreage of crops on daily or weekly basis.“The prices of agricultural produce crash when there is ample production. Finally, farmers incur losses due to rise in supply of the produce as compared to demand. Hence, there is a need to create separate mechanism that will get realistic figures of sowing or plantation of agricultural produce,” Nyaharkar said.Manik Patil, a grape farmer, laid emphasis on the increasing cost of pesticides. “The costs of pesticides and fungicides have increased by 50% in the past four-five years. They are still increasing by 5-10% every year. Hence, the government needs to take measures for providing pesticides and fungicides at low rates. Moreover, input costs of seeds and fertilisers should be brought down so that production cost can reduce,” he said.

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