An investment of nearly Rs 1,000 crore on the National Monsoon Mission gives an economic benefit of more than Rs 50,000 crore because of the economic benefits that farmers and fishermen accrued in five years, suggests new analysis by an economic think tank.
Quantifying the economic gains of the mission, the report by the National Centre for Applied Economic Research, Delhi observed that an investment of Rs 990 crore fetched economic benefits worth Rs 50,447 crore – a jump of 50 times.
The benefits were estimated with inputs from two lakh farmers, livestock owners and fishermen out of which 6000 plus were interviewed face to face while 1.94 lakhs gave their inputs through an automated telephonic system.
The assessment is released months before the launch of the third phase of the National Monsoon Mission for which the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences would seek funding more than what was spent on the ongoing phase of the mission.
One of the aims of the next phase is to upgrade the supercomputing facility from the existing level of 10 petaflops to 40 petaflops (one petaflop is one quadrillion floating-point operations per second) for the purpose of giving out the accurate weather forecast at the district and block level.
“We do have the option of third party assessment of our programme and decided to review the monsoon mission to find out how it helped the farmers and fishermen,” M Rajeevan, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences told DH.
The NCAER report was released by the Union Science and Technology minister Harsh Vardhan here on Tuesday.
It showed that 80% of the farmers and 83% of livestock owners who received information on natural calamities reported having reduced losses occurring due to them.
Almost 98% of farmers and 76% of livestock owners made modifications to at least one of the critical practices based on the weather advisories and had income gain.
Similarly, 95% of the fishermen avoided empty trips by following ocean service advisories. Most of them received timely information on cyclones and floods and at least 86% of them were able to minimise their losses.
“The total economic benefits to the agricultural households (farmers and livestock owners taken together) for a five year period works out to be Rs 48,056 crore whereas it is Rs 2391 crore for fishermen,” said Poonam Munjal, NCAER economist and one of the coauthors of the report.
“With our programme, we can reach out to 43 million farmers at the moment. Our aim is to reach out to more than 93 million farmers,” said Vardhan.