“How
agonised we are when people die, and how untroubled we are by how they live.” -
P. Sainath
By
the time India won freedom in 1947 after about 600 years of colonial rule, she
and her majorly agrarian populace was badly battered and bruised. It has been
72 years hence, but the Indian farmers continue to writhe in the shackles of
inequity, fettered by maladministered policies.
According
to the Economic Survey released in 2018, roughly half of India resort to
agriculture for livelihood. We have some of the most fertile land in the world
such as the Gangetic plains. Though our food export basket may not be very
diverse, India is only second after China in terms of the global food export
volume. The government also regularly rolls out a number of policies and
schemes to handhold the sector. Why then is the total agricultural contribution
to the country’s GDP less than 17%? Why is it that the farmers still suffer
from extreme climatic vulnerability, high price volatility, indebtedness and
exploitation?
Although
half the country is directly involved in agriculture, most of it is considered
to be seasonal or disguised employment with very low per capita productivity
and remuneration. But it also
true that any shortfall in the yearly urban to rural migration of labour destroys
the entire supply chain activity, starting with the inability to harvest crops
on time. This points to the abysmal state of farm mechanization in the
country, mostly a result of extremely fragmented land holdings. Even if one manages
to harvest, storage becomes the next perplexing conundrum. This is being
demonstrated live across the country in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic that
reinstates the age old saying, that the poor always get the short end of the
stick. Besides
this, the practiced form of agriculture is highly unproductive with huge
information asymmetry when it comes to suitable cropping, soil health and
irrigation, while facilities for the same are sanctioned and implemented only on
paper. The governments' urban driven policies signal that the rural farmer will
always receive second class treatment, be it in terms of access to
infrastructure or price fixing. Many propose policy reforms or technological
advancements as a solution to this conundrum. This calls for retrospection.
Shortly
after independence, government undertook land reforms to address the dismal
state of agriculture in the country, albeit without success. This included abolishing
intermediary interests such as the Zamindari system, introducing tenancy
reforms to weed out the issue of insecure tenancy, imposing land ceiling to
curb concentration of vast amounts of land among a few, and consolidating
fragmented land holdings to check its uneconomic nature.
But
the focus of the policy makers soon shifted to industrialization as a means to
eradicate rural poverty and boost economic growth, and agriculture was left to
fend for itself. Reaffirming what Thomas Malthus observed way back in the
1700s, the population grew exponentially while agriculture continued to snail in
a linear fashion. The resultant food insecurity paved the path for Green
revolution in the country.
While
Green Revolution is considered to have achieved resounding success in creating
a surplus in the country’s food reserves by focusing on the productivity, it
was not accompanied by systemic measures or policy changes to improve the
condition of the small and marginal farmers who make up almost 80% of the
farming community. While there was a rise in the net per capita income by 190% soon
after, this was limited to the bigger farmers of a few geographic areas like
Punjab, UP and Haryana. But a 150% rise in input cost followed, plaguing all
farmers irrespective of size of land holdings. Along with a short-lived respite
from hunger, there emerged widened income inequality, inequitable distribution
of assets and unnecessary mechanization that pushed down rural wages.
This
reiterates the fact that technicalization of agriculture or sweeping policy
changes are not panaceas to agrarian distress. They must be accompanied by the
availability of markets, quality roads, avenues of value addition and access to
fair prices in a steady market.
45%
of the consumption in the FMCG sector is accounted for by rural households.
Thus, a boost in the agrarian economy could just be the answer to most of
India’s economic and developmental concerns. If the government is serious about
its promise of doubling farmer incomes by 2022, the way forward is not by band-aid
policies of loan waivers or transfer payments. It needs a multi-pronged
approach of cooperative federalism from the Centre and the State governments,
to integrate and implement the various disjointed schemes that currently
function independently of one another. When data says 40% of the produce is
almost always lost to post production losses, the policy makers should
understand that increasing productivity is not synonymous with improving
incomes or living standards. It involves revisiting the fundamentals to provide
for what the system is lacking in – be it facilitating adequate forward
linkage points, ensuring a market for the produce, ensuring availability of basic infrastructure, connectivity, and also diversification of
secondary income sources like dairy, poultry and fisheries.
We shall try and explore further the widely proposed solutions in the coming weeks.
