Mumbai: The government will provide Rs25,000 crore in the next four years to boost agricultural production, prime minister Manmohan Singh said.

"The planning commission and the agriculture ministry will finalise the details of this programme in the next two months," he said at the concluding session of a meeting of the National Development Council.

The prime minister said the less than 2 per cent annual growth in the agriculture sector since the mid-1990s was a cause for concern and called for higher production of agricultural products to check inflation and lift the economy''s sustainable growth rate.

It was important to address this if the broader economy was to achieve 10 per cent growth by 2011-12, he said.

"Reversing the prolonged slowdown in this sector is essential for our goal of inclusive growth, for ensuring that growth benefits all sections of society and all regions of the country," he said.

"The rates of growth of agriculture in the last decade have been poor and is a major cause of rural distress," he told a conference of senior government officials.

The prime minister said India needed to boost production of wheat, rice, pulses and edible oils to check inflation, which jumped to a two-year high in January.

"The recent rise in prices of certain food products has been the result of slow supply response to rising demand. This has been particularly true of wheat, pulses and edible oils," Singh said. "We have had to import many of these products to ensure adequate availability of essential food items," he added.

The government, meanwhile, has prepared schemes to help raise output of these food items within three years to keep prices in check and ensure adequate supplies for the 1.1 billion population.

Rising food costs pushed the annual increase in wholesale prices in late January to 6.7 per cent - a two-year high. They eased to an eight-month low of 5.3 per cent in mid-May. But the government wanted to bring the inflation rate down to 4.0 to 4.5 per cent, finance minister P Chidambaram told the meeting.

"From the point of view of sound macroeconomic management, it is necessary that we maintain adequate supplies of food articles and the resulting price stability," he said.

Agriculture minister Sharad Pawar said India would need about 25 million tonnes of additional food grains by the end of 2011-12. Pawar blamed low productivity in agriculture to small landholdings.

"Farming is increasingly becoming an unviable activity, particularly because of nature of land holdings," he said.