Chief Secretary directed to start training and plantation activities from August.
Bhubaneswar: In another step towards enhancing farmer’s income through crop diversification, Government has initiated steps for promotion of agro-entrepreneurship among farmers in aromatic culture. This was decided in a high level meeting held under the Chairmanship of Chief Secretary Sri Aditya Prasad Padhi in secretariat conference hall today wherein Secretary Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises ( MSME) , Government of India Sri Arun Kumar Panda assured all technical and knowledge support from Fragrance & Flavour Development Center ( FFDC) , an autonomous institution working for development and research in aroma industry.
It was decided in the meeting that a pilot programme would be grounded in the district of Ganjam for assessing the outcomes. The programme would be extended to other coastal and hill regions of the State on the basis of the outcomes from this pilot project. Chief Secretary Sri Padhi directed to provide appropriate support to the farmers right from training to cultivation, distillation, quality assessment and marketing linkage within easy access. Central Secretary Sri Panda advised to start with the aroma plants like vetiver, palmarosa, and kerwa.
Discussions in the meeting show that a farmer can enhance his income by cultivating kerwa on boundary bonds of agricultural filed and palmarosa or vetiver in the middle depending on the type of land. The low and water logging fields are suitable for vetiver cultivation and comparatively high land fields are suitable for palmarose cultivation. The farmer can harvest the crops within 6 to 12 months. Experts said that the income from cultivation of one acre of palmarosa would be around Rs.35000/- and the income from vetiver per acer would be around Rs.60,000/- Apart from that farmer could make money from kewra planted on boundary of the fields. It was targeted to start the first phase pilot programme from the month of August 2018 involving around 400 farmers.
Chief Secretary Sri Padhi advised FFDC to install common facility centers for distillation and extraction of aroma juice from the crop. With increase in crop area the distillation units would be set up at filed level. Central Secretary Sri Panda said that marketing tie up with industries would be made through the support of FFDC under Ministry of MSME and CIMAP under Council of Scientific and Agricultural Research (CSAR).
Agriculture Production Commissioner Sri Gagan Kumar Dhal, Additional Chief Secretary Micro Small and Medium Enterprise Sri Laxmi Narayan Gupta, Director FFDC Sri Shakti Vinoy Shukla, Unit Head Berhampur Extension Center of FFDC Sri V.V.Ramarao along with other senior officers participated in deliberations.
