The World Bank will support the proposed National Agricultural Technology Project (NATP), which is aimed at promoting generation, dissemination, adoption and use of appropriate agricultural technologies through a number of policy reforms, institutional development and investment, according to a press release.

The NATP will have three programmatic elements, such as agriculture research support, agriculture extension support and development of supply chains.

Under the agriculture research support, the project will provide competitive grants to undertake strategic and cross-cutting research on selected priority themes besides enhancing efficiency of the agriculture research institutes.

Decentralisation of extension service and strengthening of research-extension-farmer linkages are envisaged under the agriculture extension support component.

The Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock will jointly implement this project.

The estimated cost of this project is about US$ 85 million, of which the bank will provide approximately US$ 62 million. International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) will also provide US$ 20 million, while the government's own contribution will be about US$ 3 million.

The programme will be implemented over a period of 15 years in three phases and each phase will be of five year duration with clearly defined performance targets.