Rs. 2000 crore for agri-market infrastructure fund set up.
Rs.2000 Crore fund to be set up for developing and upgrading agricultural marketing infrastructure in the 22000 grams and 585 APMCS [...] Shri Jaitley said that in the last Budget, the Government had announced strengthening of e-NAM and to expand coverage of e-NAM to 585 APMCs. Out of that, 470 APMCs have been connected to e-NAM network and rest will be connected by March, 2018. Further, an Agri-Market Infrastructure Fund with a corpus of Rs.2000 crore will be set up for developing and upgrading agricultural marketing infrastructure in the 22000 Grameen Agricultural Markets (GrAMs) and 585 APMCs, the Minister informed. [...] Announcing a major step to help small and marginal farmers in fisheries and animal husbandry sector to meet their working capital needs, the Finance Minister extended the facility of Kisan Credit Cards (KCC) to the sector. This would give benefit of crop loan and interest subvention, so far available to agriculture sector only under KCC, for rearing of cattle, buffalo, goat, sheep poultry and fisheries. Further, the Finance Minister also announced setting up of 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. Total Corpus of these two new Funds would be Rs.10,000 crore.