Agriculture will be the focus of the 11th Five-Year Plan and the bottomline is to increase production and productivity in rainfed areas, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told party chief ministers.

Sonia said industrial activities “must be done without jeopardising our agriculture prospects.” In an apparent reference to large number of proposed SEZs, she said, “Prime agricultural land should not normally be diverted to non-agricultural uses.” She said it was time to “scale new frontiers and accomplish new breakthroughs” in agriculture. “Agriculture must be the focus,” she said of the 11th Plan paper currently under discussion.

Singh said the country could not “rest on past laurels” and “agricultural production must go up across the spectrum — in foodgrains, edible oils and vegetables.”

Both Sonia and Singh also outlined the path towards a “new deal for rural India”, the focus being rainfed area farming, which is 70 pc of the total, and 250 poorest districts to be covered under the new Backward Regions Grant Fund.

“This area happens to be the less developed, economically poorer one as well. I believe the next big breakthrough has to be in these regions,” the Prime Minister said. He said the newly constituted National Rainfed Area Authority (NRAA) will be functioning through state-level agencies. Both leaders said “as in the past, technology would play a key role.”

Singh said Backward Regions Grant Fund of Rs 3700 crore for 250 districts under Panchayati Raj Ministry would “become single biggest instrument for effecting participatory planning at the local level.”

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