Mumbai, April 3, 2003
ITC Limited has firmed up plans to invest Rs 1000 crores
over the next ten years to grow its agribusiness and enhance the competitiveness of Indian
agriculture at the same time. Delivering the keynote address at the CII Agricultural
Summit in Mumbai on Thursday, ITC chairman Mr Y.C. Deveshwar said that the company was
undertaking this farsighted investment to facilitate India’s evolution as a
competitive source of supply of agricultural produce for the attractive global markets of
the post-WTO era.
As a farmer Company for nearly a century, ITC has
demonstrated the practicality of the unique win-win growth model that it has put in place
by synergistically combining the growth of its agricultural businesses with the
enhancement of the international competitiveness of the Indian farmer. The network of ITC,
as a large and diversified Indian conglomerate, is enabling the Indian farmer prepare to
cope with the emerging demands of increasingly intense global competition and the advent
of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) framework from January 1, 2005.
Giving details of the specific areas of investment in the
farm sector, Mr Deveshwar said the money would be pumped into ITC's ongoing business
activities in the areas of farm forestry, integrated watershed development and the
‘e-choupal’ initiative.
ITC’s ‘e-choupal’ initiative is the single
largest corporate IT intervention in rural India. ITC has set up Internet kiosks in the
farmers’ own villages. At these kiosks even the smallest farmers can readily access
the crop-specific vernacular websites created by ITC, and get to know the local weather
forecast, the best farm practices, and the prevalent prices and price trends for their
crops. ‘e-Choupal’ today reaches out to more than 1.2 million farmers in 11,000
villages through 1900 kiosks.
ITC’s vision is to extend this interactive transaction
and fulfillment channel over the next decade to cover 100,000 villages, representing 1/6th
of India, thereby reaching out to millions of farmers growing a range of agricultural
products. This project is a manifestation of ITC’s commitment to go beyond the market
and the immediate business need and add value to the entire agricultural value chain in
the Indian economy and enhance the international competitiveness of Indian agriculture.
ITC’s farm forestry programme encourages farmers to
create plantations on their hitherto unused private wastelands. ITC gives farmers
high-yielding disease-resistant clones, developed through its bio-technology based
research project in Andhra Pradesh, to rear plantations. These plantations then become the
source of raw materials for its paperboards manufacture. 9000 farmers have so far planted
32 million saplings. The aim is to rear 100 million saplings over 50,000 hectares of
wastelands over the next decade, creating employment potential for over 80,000 households.
ITC’s integrated watershed development initiative aims
to create 1,0000 large and small water harvesting structures over a decade, thereby
increasing water storage capacity by nearly 1.5 billion litres. The objective is to
reverse the severe water shortage afflicting 67 per cent of the total cultivated area in
the country, contributing 45% of India’s food.
The ITC Chairman pointed out that Central and State
Governments have an obligation to create a nurturing policy framework to unlock the full
potential of Indian agriculture. Companies like ITC with a long-term agribusiness
perspective need to be encouraged to make the requisite investments to strengthen the
country’s infrastructure for agriculture and enhance agricultural productivity
through sustained extension work.
