New Delhi: A corpus fund to the tune of Rs 50,000 crore to compensate farmers for pesticide-related crop failure and higher penalties for using banned pesticides are some of the key provisions of the draft Pesticide Management bill cleared by the Union cabinet Wednesday, ThePrint has learnt.
The Pesticides Management Bill, 2020, meant to replace the existing Insecticides Act of 1968, is being piloted by the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers, and will be introduced in the Budget session when it reconvenes in March.
If the bill is cleared, farmers will receive compensation directly in their bank accounts linked to the fertiliser subsidy through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT), government sources told ThePrint.
The fund will be put together from contributions by the pesticide organisations that have officially registered their product with the government, the Centre and state governments in a 60:20:20 ratio, senior ministry officials said.
Also read: A ‘post-chemical world’ is building as agribusinesses go green
Penalty hike
The draft bill proposes to increase the penalties for using banned pesticides. “This has been done to prevent falsified representation of all kinds of pesticide in the market because there are too many bogus participants that are operating in this largely unregulated field and they get away with paying the current level of civil penalties. For them, it is just a cost of doing business,” one of the officials quoted earlier said.
The bill proposes to raise the penalty on the sale of prohibited pesticides to upto Rs 50 lakh and three to five years of imprisonment. The existing penalty is a fine of Rs 2,000 and a jail term of three years.
The bill further provides for setting up a central board comprising of representatives from the Centre, states and farmers who have an understanding of the agro-ecological climate, environment and soil conditions of their respective regions. The board will look into various aspects of regulating pesticide use such as registration and bans, along with other issues like sales, packaging, labelling, pricing, storage and facts in product advertisements.
A separate portal will also be set up by the ministry where a farmer can access information on pesticides — their strengths and weaknesses, the risks and alternatives available, in all languages.
This portal will also be used to handle compensation of crop loss due to pesticides.
Also read: India can’t have true reform in agriculture if we keep hitching it to rural development
More bans to come
The draft bill also proposes updating the list of banned of pesticides, for which the agriculture ministry has already provided inputs.
“The number of banned pesticides in India could go up from a current count of 40 to 75. Also, the bill provides for banning the import of several pesticide formulations,” said a senior agriculture ministry official.
“One of the primary objectives to ban a few pesticides and formulation under this bill is to stop the usage of controversial weed killers like ‘Dicamba’, which often drifts off from primary fields and kills neighbouring crops in the area,” the official added.
Also read: India’s agriculture departments are complex. But Odisha is using data to fix it