Secondary agriculture: Re-vitaliser for indian farming

Secondary agriculture or value added agriculture, which is deemed as sunrise sector of economy, holds immense potential for farmers and nation as a whole. Adding value to agriculture has twin benefits of assuring optimum returns to the producers as well as reducing the substantial amount of crop losses otherwise. It is also an enabling factor to retain rural youth to rural areas due to generation of income and employment opportunities, who otherwise migrate to urban areas in search of attractive earning options. In today's global economy of steep competition, it is extremely difficult to solely focus on production and still expect to realize a decent standard of living. Particularly, India has a colossal loss of agricultural produce every year which needs to be utilized rationally. Also, in the wake of ongoing agrarian crisis today, it is essentially needed to adopt farm-income centric approach rather than simply a production approach. India's large market size, ever-changing lifestyles, food habits and customer tastes, create incredible market opportunities for food producers, food processors, machine fabricators, food technologists and service providers in this sector. Hence, owing to these factors greater emphasis on processing and value-addition of raw agricultural produce is required. Government has also helped promote this sector in the form of major plans like Mega-food Parks and Scheme for Cold Chain, Value Addition and Preservation Infrastructure. Also, at smaller level, the government has tried to infuse life to it by plans like MUDRA (Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency), which makes it quite easy to set up processing units. Promoting secondary agriculture will push up country's overall farm growth and will come up in a big way in doubling farmers’ income by 2022.