The Indian government has decided to have a longer tenure of 10 years for the proposed Cotton Productivity Mission after the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) suggested the initially proposed 5-year tenure was not enough, sources said. The ICAR, which is piloting the mission, is awaiting the Agriculture Department’s inputs to finalise it, The mission was announced in the 2025-26 Budget.
Even as the rollout of plan gets delayed, the Ministry of Textiles is said to be insisting on using the funding from the proposed Mission for modernisation of ginning factories even after its proposal was negated by the Department of Expenditure as well as Niti Aayog, sources said.
After this, the initial plan to put the expenditure of the Cotton Productivity Mission at about Rs 5,000 crore, including about Rs 4,000 crore proposed to be spent by the Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, may undergo an upward revision, depending on the tenure of its implementation.
5F vision
In her Budget speech for 2025-26, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said: “For the benefit of lakhs of cotton growing farmers, I am pleased to announce a ‘Mission for Cotton Productivity’. This 5-year mission will facilitate significant improvements in productivity and sustainability of cotton farming, and promote extra-long staple cotton varieties. The best of science and technology support will be provided to farmers.
“Aligned with our integrated 5F (farm, fibre, factory, fashion and foreign) vision for the textile sector, this will help in increasing incomes of the farmers, and ensure a steady supply of quality cotton for rejuvenating India’s traditional textile sector.”
As the proposal is yet to receive approval of the Expenditure Finance Commission, the plan by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Ministry of Textiles were earlier brought before the Department of Expenditure, it said that the textile ministry’s proposals were not conforming to the Budget announcement.
“The components proposed under Mini Mission-II and Mini Mission-III to be implemented by the Ministry of Textiles are not covered in the Budget announcement. Therefore, Mini Mission-Il and Mini Mission-III are not supported and they should be removed from the proposed Mission,” the Department of Expenditure (DoE) said in a note.
Centrally-sponsored scheme
It has also suggested ICAR not to make it a “Central Sector Scheme” rather re-designed as a “Centrally Sponsored Scheme” since agriculture is a state subject. In Centrally Sponsored scheme, the expenditure is shared between the Centre and States.
The DoE has also pointed out to ICAR that there is an overlap of its Mission proposal on the “seed research and development component” with the proposed Mission on High Yielding Seeds (another budget announcement of 2025-26), and as such it should not be part of the proposed Cotton Productivity Mission.
Further, DoE has also asked the Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare to reduce the expenditure of the National Food Security and Nutrition Mission (NFSNM) after removing cotton from its programme since the Cotton Productivity Mission will take care of the same activities.
Justifying its role
But, the Ministry of Textiles has tried to justify its role saying it was earlier involved as an agency to implement the Mission, along with ICAR for which it has also conducted webinar.
It has argued that lint quality is determined by various post-harvest operations including contamination control, scientific handling, bale preparation, ginning, pressing and certification for which industry’s participation is necessary.
Experts said that by stretching the same logic all agriculture processing units — rice, flour, edible oil, which are related with Ministry of Food Processing Industries, will claim role in the productivity increase of raw materials and as such, the MoFPI should also be involved in many of the schemes of the agriculture ministry.
Sources said that ICAR should be told to submit the proposal to the PMO without waiting for feedback from any ministry and a combined meeting of all the departments at the top level should thrash out all bottlenecks, once and for all.
India’s cotton production in 2024-25 dropped to 29.72 million bales (of 170 kg each) from 32.52 million bales in 2023-24. The government is yet to release the estimated production in 2025-26. But, trade body Cotton Association of India has pegged 2025-26 production to be 30.5 million bales as against 31.2 million bales in 2024-25.
Published on November 21, 2025
