Ten per cent growth amid the dance of death

To revive Indian agriculture from the abyss of low growth and mass suicides, farmers desperately need an income commission as a social security net

Devinder Sharma Delhi

Forty years after the dawn of the green revolution, Indian agriculture is once again at crossroads. With agriculture becoming unremunerative over the years, and with input-output ratio faltering, growth in agriculture has decelerated. When forests are destroyed, soil fertility is diminished or water table plummets to dangerously low levels, the rural poor often have no option but to migrate to towns and cities in search of jobs. Such inequitable development is leading to serious social disintegration.

For a country that emerged from the throes of a ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence, to be subsequently able to build up food-grain reserves, sustainable agriculture was the unmistaken path to equitable growth, development and national food security. The green revolution technology, which ushered in ‘food self-sufficiency’, however, came with enormous environmental costs. Monoculture, mechanical ploughing, soil erosion, the extension of crops into forests and the use and abuse of chemicals have contributed to the second-generation environmental impacts that the intensively farmed lands of the country are still grappling with.

The green revolution has not only gone sour, it has collapsed. The unexplained number of massive and relentless farmer suicides is testimony to the entire equation going wrong. However, the fundamental issue of destruction of sustainable livelihoods is not being addressed at all.

Village after village across the country are turning into a cesspool of deprivation and mounting indebtedness arising from the blind adoption of intensive farming systems that the government promoted. You don’t come across villages that are not facing a real crisis in sustainability—yields declining drastically, soil gasping for breath, and farmers being pushed out of agriculture. No wonder, villages are being put on sale in many parts of the country.

It isn’t the spate of farmer suicides, on an upswing and still counting, that makes Prime Minister Manmohan Singh admit the magnitude of the agrarian crisis that prevails. The unforeseen slump in agriculture growth rate—slipping between one and two per cent—in turn, has decisively affected the industrial growth rate, which restricted quantum jumps in the national economy. This is what concerns the prime minister. 

In what appears to be a desperate move to prop up agricultural growth, the prime minister has, time and again, called for reversing the declining trend in investment in agriculture. Among the measures mentioned are stepping up credit flow to farmers, strengthening future trading and contract farming, creating a ‘single market’ for agricultural produce and providing the latest technology to farmers. Strikingly similar to the faulty Vision 2020 that the former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, had unsuccessfully applied (he was consequently routed out in the last elections), the prime minister’s approach is also aimed at compounding the existing crisis in farming.  

There is urgent need to draw a national framework under which location-specific alterations and adaptations need to be tried. What is needed is a fresh approach that takes ground realities into consideration before embarking upon any policy imperatives. Unfortunately, the prime minister is fostering on the nation a faulty farm strategy that has failed in the US and Europe, resulting in the eviction of farmers over the years. In the US, only seven lakh farmers now remain on the farm. In Europe, every minute one farmer quits agriculture.