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Cabinet clears policy to double agri exports
News:
The Union Cabinet has cleared Agriculture Export Policy, 2018 which is in line with Prime Minister’s commitment to double farmers’ income by 2022.
Important Facts:
- Aim of the policy: The policy seeks to harness the export potential of Indian agriculture, through suitable policy instruments, to make India global power in agriculture and raise farmers’ income
- Objectives:
- To increase India’s agricultural exports to $60 billion by 2022 from the current $37 billion and reach $100 billion after few years, with a stable trade policy regime
- To diversify the export basket, destinations and boost high value and value added agricultural exports including focus on perishables.
- To promote novel, indigenous, organic, ethnic, traditional and non-traditional Agri products exports.
- Focus on export centric clusters for integrated Commodity Focus Value Chain and Infrastructure Development.
- To provide an institutional mechanism for pursuing market access, tackling barriers and deal with sanitary and phyto-sanitary issues.
- To strive to double India’s share in world agri exports by integrating with global value chain at the earliest.
- Enable farmers to get benefit of export opportunities in overseas market.
- Elements of Agriculture Export Policy: The recommendations in the Agriculture Export Policy have been organised in two categories – Strategic and Operational
| Sudipto Mundle Committee data | GDP back series data released by CSO and NITI Aayog |
|---|---|
| ● The National Statistical Commission (NSC) constituted a Committee on Real Sector Statistics under Dr. Sudipto Mundle in April, 2017. | ● Since 2015, to gauge the long-term growth trends of the Indian economy there was a need for an official estimate of the older GDP series – the one recalibrated to the new base and the new methods. |
| ● It discusses alternative approaches for converting the old GDP series to the new base year 2011-12. | ● As per the CSO numbers, India’s GDP grew 8.5 percent in the financial year 2010-11 as compared to the earlier estimated figure of 10.3 percent. |
| ● The committee uses production shift approach- uses sectors for which data is available. | ● With the shift to the new base year 2011-12 from 2004-05, the MCA-21 database got used in addition to the volume index of Index of Industrial Production (IIP) and establishment-based dataset of Annual Survey of Industries (ASI). |
| ● The committee’s report produced new back series data, which showed that the Indian economy grew at a faster clip in two terms of the UPA, between 2004-05 and 2013-14, when compared with average growth recorded in the first four years (2014-15 to 2017-18) of the NDA-II government. | ● MCA-21, an e-governance initiative of the Ministry of Company Affairs was launched in 2006, to allow firms to electronically file their financial results. |
| ● In 2006-07, GDP at factor cost touched double digit growth rate at 10.08 per cent. | ● In certain cases, owing to the limitations of the availability of data, splicing method has been used. |
| ● Mundle’s committee submitted the report to the National Statistical Commission. | ● Splicing is a statistical technique of converting two, or more series of index numbers of different bases into a continuous series with a common base. |
| ● But the findings of the report prompted the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation to issue a statement on August 19 that “the estimates in the report are not official estimates and are meant only to facilitate taking a decision on the appropriate approach”. | ● The new series shows that value addition in tradewas significantly lower than what was being projected in the old series, which used extrapolated data from a survey conducted in 1999. |
