Union Budget seems to be in Sync with Telangana Schemes

Hyderabad: Call it replication or sheer coincidence, but one cannot miss the series of measures announced by the Central government in its latest Budget which are similar to novel initiatives launched by the Telangana government.

From farm clusters to MSP, drinking water supply to every household to promotion of livestock and fisheries, and Ekalavya hostels to residential schools for SCs, STs and BCs in the State, striking similarities can be drawn between the Central and State government schemes.

In his Budget speech, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced that the Union government will encourage organic farming by Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) and Village Producers Organisations (VPOs) in large clusters, where the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare will reorient its ongoing schemes and promote cluster-based development of farm commodities and regions.

Interestingly, the State government has already formed Farmers Association Coordination Committees (FACCs) and proposes to provide investment support under Farmers Investment Support Scheme (FISS) commencing from the kharif season.

For the first time in the recent past, the Central government came up with two new funds — a Fisheries and Aquaculture Infrastructure Development Fund (FAIDF) for fisheries sector and an Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Development Fund (AHIDF) for financing infrastructure requirement of animal husbandry sector.

The total corpus of these two new funds would be Rs 10,000 crore. The Telangana government has launched sheep distribution and fishling distribution schemes to encourage livestock and fisheries sectors, which are already yielding good results.