President Pratibha Patil calls for urgent steps to curb spiralling food prices

President Pratibha Patil today called for urgent steps towards a second green revolution to ensure food availability and to avoid spiralling prices.

Her suggestion to the government in her address to the nation on the eve of Republic Day assumes significance in the context of rising prices of food articles.

"The world over, as also in our country, there is a rising demand for food-grains. This foretells the need for an intense focus on increasing agriculture productivity to ensure food availability, particularly of agricultural produces which are in short supply, to avoid spiralling food prices," Patil said.

To achieve this very important objective, she called for urgent steps towards a second green revolution.

"There should be use of new technologies, better seeds, improved farming practices, effective water management techniques, as well as more intense frameworks for connecting the farmer with the scientific community, with lending institutions and with markets," she said.

The president said the country's farmers were ready and willing to work, earn and learn and there was a need to respond to them positively and do some "out of the box thinking".