PM-RKVY

“Mushroom is named exactly once in 354 pages, and not in a cost-norm table. Under the Rainfed Area Development component, section B.6.3 Interventions: "Depending on the type and extent of natural resources/assets/commodities already developed or supported, location-specific crops, fruits, feed & fodder, livestock, fisheries, apiculture, mushroom, medicinal & aromatic plantation and related income generating activities would be supported." RAD's own cost norms, at Annexure-XLIV, run to eight rows (Integrated Farming System, fishery units, apiculture, silage making, vermicompost/organic input units, capacity building, project formulation for the Voluntary Carbon Market, and administrative cost), and mushroom is none of them; the flat "Rs.30,000/-(thirty thousand) will be provided to each farming family" there is for taking up the Integrated Farming System at S.No.1 together with "at least two activities given at S.No.2 to 5", a list mushroom does not appear in. The component a mushroom project would actually be proposed under, RKVY-DPR, prices nothing by design. Its own Cost Norms clause: "DPR is a gap filling scheme wherein projects related to agriculture and other sectors for creation of infrastructure and innovative projects that do not fit into the template of existing schemes of DA&FW are to be proposed by the States... Technical requirements/standards and financial norms (cost norms and pattern of assistance) etc. specified for these schemes will also be applicable for RKVY-DPR. In the absence of such criterion in respect of any component in Central Plan Scheme, norms and conditions prescribed by respective State Governments for their schemes may be applied. In cases where no Central / State Govt. norms are available, a certificate of reasonableness of the proposed project will in variably be given by SLSC." Mushroom is not on the illustrative exclusion list at Annexure-VI either, so it is funded and unpriced rather than excluded. Funding pattern, from section 5: 60:40 between Centre and State, 90:10 for North Eastern and Himalayan States, 100% central grant for Union Territories. Because the instrument prices nothing, any rupee figure presented as "the RKVY mushroom subsidy" has come from somewhere else. The one such figure this pass found in circulation is "An assistance of Rs. 80,000/-for the construction of mushroom house of size 20x12x10 ft, installation of racks in mushroom house, procurement of mushroom kit, tools etc. and pasteurized compost to the registered mushroom growers", printed under the heading "Rastriya Krishi Vikas Yojna" in NABARD's model bankable project for mushroom cultivation in Himachal Pradesh, which is archived on this site with its own digest. Read in place, that figure sits in a list headed "State Government Initiatives for Mushroom Development... implemented by the Department of Horticulture, GoHP": it is one State's programme, described in a report that prints no date of its own and whose latest internal reference is to the Potential Credit Plans for 2016-17, and which quotes MIDH and NHB rates that have since been replaced, under RKVY guidelines that have since been replaced twice. It is not a national RKVY rate and no grower outside that programme can claim it.”