Agriculture stocks spike up to 6% on big push to rural India in Budget 2018

Agriculture-related stocks rallied up to 6 per cent on Thursday soon after the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced favourable measures such as hiking minimum support price (MSP), allocating more funds to rural-focused schemes to boost agriculture sector. 

NACL Industries, PI Industries, Super Crop Safe and Monsanto rallied in the range of 4 per cent to 6 per cent, while BASF India, Atul, UPL and Rallis were up between 1 per cent to 3 per cent on the BSE. 

"The Minimum Support Price of all crops shall be increased to at least 1.5 times that of the production cost," said FM Jaitley in his Budget speech. 

Jaitley also allocated additinal fund of Rs 20,000 crore to Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC), adding around 22,000 rural agriculture market will be developed to provide employment to rural India.  

The Jaitley allocated additional Rs 500 crore to smoothen the supply of potatos, onions, and tomatoes, which often suffer spike in retail prices. 

FM also seeks to double farmers' income by 2022. "We consider agriculture as an enterprise. We seek to enable farmers to produce more from same land size," he said.