Meghalaya cabinet approves draft of State Agriculture, Marketing (Amendment) Bill

Shillong, May 15:

The Meghalaya Cabinet today approved the draft of the Meghalaya State Agriculture Produce and Livestock Marketing Promotion and Facilitation (Amendment) Bill, 2020 which will be tabled in the upcoming re-assembled budget session which will begin from May 20.

"We have approved the draft amendment bill after some fine tuning," Deputy Chief Minister, Prestone Tynsong told reporters after the Cabinet meeting.

Informing that the Government had held a meeting with the three Autonomous District Councils (ADCs) to discuss on the draft amendment bill yesterday, he said that the views of the various ADCs have to been taken note of.

According to him, the Government had initiated this amendment since they wanted to add more items in the existing Meghalaya State Agricultural and Marketing Act, 1980.

"Livestock, fisheries and medicinal plants was not included in the existing Act. All these three items have been included in the draft amendment bill," he added.

Earlier, Meghalaya Agriculture Minister, Banteidor Lyngdoh had said that the proposed draft amendment bill focus on development of proper marketing infrastructure like marketing platforms, storage facilities, cold storage, godowns and will also help in forming an organised marketing system and will enable farmers to avail schemes under E- naam.

He informed that the State government had constituted a special task force to look into the plight of the farming community and efforts are on to provide relief in whichever way possible.

Agriculture Minister also mentioned that this Act will also help farmers in agricultural marketing system and will help more transparency in transactions between traders and farmers which is expected to give higher returns to the farmers.

It may be mentioned that the State Government had initiated amendment after the Centre had requested all the respective State governments to revisit the present form of the Agricultural marketing Act.