Thursday, November 01, 2012

How to reinvent India’s agriculture sector

Sompal Shastri puts eight points which must be followed if something has to done

There is hard evidence to indicate that the initial gains of the Green Revolution are now petering out. Food grain production is slackening. Its rate of growth is much slower than that of population. Pulses and edible oils have been regularly imported, while wheat and sugar too are at times sourced from abroad. So, even the self sufficiency in food production seems to be in jeopardy. Natural resource base of agriculture is crumbling. Use of land for urbanization and industrialisation is constricting the availability of cultivable land, which was 0.36 hectare per capita at the time of independence, but has come down to around 0.12 currently, and is likely to shrink to 0.09 by 2025. Soils are experiencing serious fatigue. Yields have started showing declining trends in terms of input output response, as several soil nutrients and organic matter have depleted drastically. Area under irrigation, instead of expanding, is contracting.

Approximately, 60% of our agriculture still remains rain dependent. Ground water is depleting at an alarming rate. The frequency and severity of natural disasters is increasing on account of climatic changes. Costs of cultivation have been rising at a faster pace than the prices of agricultural produce. The law of diminishing returns has already set in squeezing farmers’ profits progressively. Fragmentation of land holdings has rendered about 80% of them as economically unviable. Mono cropping patterns are causing severe imbalances in the soils and endangering biodiversity. India although has become the world’s largest milk producer, but the live stock economy is in distress. The process of economic liberalization and globalization, instead of benefiting the farmers, is compounding their apprehensions and insecurity. Rural unemployment is increasing making the rural youth desperate.

The situation obviously calls for inventing a new approach and strategy. The broad contours of such a strategy could be the following.

First of all, investment in agriculture, which sustains 62% of India’s population, has remained stuck up at around 1.3% of GDP since the Fifth Five Year Plan. Irrigation though the most critical input for agriculture is the most neglected sector. I have repeatedly suggested that we should immediately formulate a Ten Year Water Plan to harness the total irrigational potential through major, medium and minor modes which includes rain water harvesting and water shed management. The investment required for this is estimated to be around Rs.400,000 crores. States alone, however, are not in a position to mobilize such resources. The central government should share it equally with them. Secondly, there has to be a land use policy strictly prohibiting conversion of fertile land for non-agricultural purposes, except in rare cases.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

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