When the mountains bring floods and landslides, Uttarakhand's hill farmers often lose everything — and now, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has committed that they will receive state government support on top of whatever standard disaster relief the central norms prescribe. The Chief Minister's Office of Uttarakhand announced the pledge on Friday, 30 October 2026, alongside a call for farmers to embrace modern and scientific farming methods alongside traditional practices.

Dhami's call to the fields: tradition plus technology

At an event attended by agriculture officials, legislators and a large number of farmers, CM Dhami stated that Uttarakhand's agriculture and horticulture sectors are opening up new possibilities — driven by the joint effort of farmers' hard work and government initiatives. He urged farmers to extract maximum benefit from government schemes while pairing age-old cultivation knowledge with modern techniques and scientific farming methods.

The appeal is pointed. Uttarakhand's hilly terrain has historically made large-scale mechanised farming difficult, but the state has been pushing horticulture — from apples and stone fruits to herbs and off-season vegetables — as a viable income stream. The gap between what schemes offer and what farmers actually access remains a persistent challenge across hill states.

Ganesh Joshi and the extra relief decision

Agriculture Minister Ganesh Joshi used the occasion to publicly thank CM Dhami for the decision to provide state-level assistance to disaster-affected farmers over and above the fixed disaster-relief norms. The announcement signals that the state government will not leave calamity-hit farm households reliant solely on standard central compensation frameworks.

Uttarakhand regularly battles monsoon-season disasters — cloudbursts, flash floods, and landslides that destroy standing crops and orchards in a matter of hours. Additional state top-ups to central disaster relief have been announced periodically in the past, but the re-commitment in a formal outreach setting — with the State Farmer Commission present — adds institutional weight to the promise. Rollout and disbursement timelines remain to be specified.

Who was in the room

The meeting brought together MLA Brijbhushan Gairola, Uttarakhand State Farmer Commission Chairman Rajendra Singh Chaudhary, party functionaries Pratap Singh Panwar and Jyoti Kotiya, Agriculture Secretary Dr S.N. Pandey, and Director General of Agriculture and Horticulture Dr Anand Srivastava. The breadth of the gathering — from elected representatives and bureaucrats to farmer commission heads — underlines that this was framed as a policy-aligned outreach, not a routine courtesy call.

For the farmers who made the trip down — or up — to be in that room, the message from Dehradun was clear: the state sees agriculture not as a legacy burden but as an active frontier, and the government is prepared to back that belief with additional relief when the hills turn hostile.