National Project on Organic Farming

With the view to promote organic farming practices to reduce the burden on Chemical Fertilizers, to ensure effective utilization of farm resources and to cater domestic and international growing Organic Food Market, a National Project on Organic Farming was launched during 10th Plan with an outlay of Rs.115.00 crores. The earlier scheme "National Project on Development and Use of Biofertilizers" has been merged with the "National Project on Organic Farming ". The main objective of the scheme includes:

• Capacity Building through Service Providers.
• Financial and Technical support for setting up of organic input production unit such as Fruits and Vegetable market waste compost, Biofertilizers and biopesticides and Vermiculture hatcheries.
• Human resource development through training and demonstration.
• Awareness creation and market development.
• Quality Control of Organic Inputs.

As a continuing efforts from previous scheme for promotion of bio-fertilizers there are around 169 bio-fertilizer production units in the country with installed capacity of 67000 MT. and annual production of more than 20 thousand ton of bio-fertilizers and more than 18800 ton of other inoculants including biopesticides.
Under the scheme a capacity has also been created for processing of 708 tons of agricultural waste per day in to compost, 5606 MT of bio-fertilizers and more than 17000 ton of vermiculture and vermicompost. Since the launch of the scheme, the area under certified organic farming has increased 20 fold from 42000 ha (2003-04) to 865,000 ha (2007-08). The organic food production has increased from 4.09 lakh ton in 2006-07 to 9.02 lakh ton during 2007-08.