CHENNAI, JAN 29: The Centre will come out with a national watershed management scheme that will harvest rain water and not allow erosion of the fertile top soil, Union Minister of State for Agriculture Sompal said on Wednesday.Laying the foundation stone for the Rs 6.3 crore Regional Plant Quarantine Station at Meenambakkam in Chennai, Sompal said the scheme, with a proposed expenditure of Rs 75,800 crore, would be included in the next few Five Year Plans, apart from the current one. An additional 63 million hectares of land would be brought under assured irrigation. Only 37 per cent of agricultural land in the country has assured irrigation now. On Tamil Nadu Agriculture Minister Veerapandi S Arumugam's demand for a Ganga-Cauvery link, Sompal said it was not feasible. Tamil Nadu had a premier research station at Coimbatore to tackle the Red Rot disease, which affected the farmers cultivating sugarcane. ``We face the problem in Uttar Pradesh also and we are looking towards Coimbatore for a solution.''Asfor the fear expressed by Arumugam about the `Terminator' seeds patented by Monsanto and Mahyco, Sompal reminded him that he had already stated in Parliament that the Centre would not allow the Terminator seeds to come to India. Also, the Terminator seeds were only in a conceptual stage. Sompal said he would consider the State's request to get World Bank approval for projects worth Rs 577.19 crore for implementation, from 1999 to 2004, as phase-II programme.TN had completed the phase-I programme with assistance from the World Bank on Sept 30, 1998.Sompal stressed the need for stringent quarantine standards with large scale exchange of germ plasm and high volume agriculture imports/exports based on requisite infrastructure facilities.
