Agriculture is still providing a livelihood to more than 70% of India’s population and is the backbone of the country’s self-sufficiency in food grains. However, the last few years have seen India go through a severe agrarian crisis and record lower-than-expected agricultural growth. The average annual growth rate in real terms in agriculture as well as its allied sectors has remained static in the last six years, in turn impacting farmers’ income, the Economic Survey 2019-20, released on January 31, 2020, has said.
The annual growth rate in real terms in agriculture and its allied sectors was 2.88 per cent from 2014-15 to 2018-19, according to the Survey. The estimated growth rate in 2019-20 is 2.9 per cent. This is a critical situation for a country in which two-thirds of the billion-plus population depends on agriculture. About 115 million families are classified as farming families. Furthermore, a country with a large population has to be nearly self-sufficient in essential food items; otherwise supply constraints could upset macroeconomic stability and growth prospects.
India also has the greatest concentration of rural households that are totally landless — 17 million households. Landlessness and rural poverty are closely linked. In fact, as a World Bank report stated, landlessness is by far the greatest predictor of poverty in India—even more so than caste or illiteracy. According to a USAID Country Report on India (quoting Government of India 2013 figures) “landless and marginal landholders still make up 82.8 percent of rural households”.
All of this underscores the importance of the country’s agricultural policy in determining the socio-economic status of its citizens. When the First Five Year Plan was launched, the central purpose of planning was identified as that of initiating “a process of development which will raise living standards and open out to the people new opportunities for a richer and more varied life.” The manner in which this purpose has been translated into specific objectives has varied from Plan to Plan and has both impacted and reflected the prevalent status. In its early years, independent India suffered several famines, droughts and food shortages. But following the Green Revolution in the 1960s, yields and food stocks rose manifold. The approach to agriculture has seen a drastic change after the opening up of the economy – the changes have not always been positive. Commercial crops are eating into fertile land tracts meant for essential food grains. Land under agriculture has reduced. Overall, the anticipated gains for India from the trade liberalization process in agriculture have not been to the desired extent. Perhaps nothing has awakened the country to this agrarian crisis more than the headline-making suicides by farmers.
This article analyses the shortcomings of the steps taken so far and offers a solution which will target a holistic approach, a shift from traditional silo-based policy making. For any agro-climatic zone area it is important to have a holistic approach as well as a one-point delivery system to get land related issues settled, provide the right cropping patterns, optimize water use, ensure the right technology, and provide inputs, knowledge, local value addition and marketing, leading finally to storage.
NEED FOR HOLISTIC APPROACH TO ENSURE OPTIMISATION OF PACKAGES GIVEN TO FARMERS
The investment in the agriculture sector is by itself not sufficient to resolve the issues of providing sustainable employment to India’s farmers who comprise a major part of the population. The need is to optimise these investments in the farm sector, intensify the gains from cultivable land, improve the land and find alternate sources of livelihood if necessary. Agriculture not only provides an income source but also sustainable employment.
Every district should draw up a district plan that fully utilizes an initial resource envelope available from all existing schemes, state or Central, including resources at the district level from Central schemes such as those of Rural Development. The district agricultural plan should include livestock and fishing and be integrated with minor irrigation projects, rural development works and with other schemes for water harvesting and conservation. The planning process should be objective-based and outcome-oriented keeping in view the sustainable management of natural resources and technological possibilities in each agroclimatic region. This needs to be ingrained in the system of delivery.
Whatever action has been taken so far towards policy making is incomplete. For example, horizontal linkages between agencies have not been identified and each of them is again emerging as a watertight compartment. The last functionary at the grassroots level needs crystal clear instructions to optimize development initiatives. But schemes with similar objectives are not yet merged and the different schemes of different agencies have their own set of instructions, making convergence a challenge.
Unfortunately, at the state level the strategy towards agriculture does not cover micro level planning. Often the broad themes that guide the Central sector and the centrally sponsored schemes (CSS) are reflected in the states’ agricultural plans. In many cases these are only little more than the state’s share of CSS whose guidelines are centrally determined and timely release of funds is always an issue. Some states are more guided by the schemes of the Centre than the local needs for agriculture in the state. Each state must focus on the issues suitable to not just its land and climate types but also its social ethos. Moreover, since Central funds flow through different channels and to different levels, district plans are no more than a collection of proposals to different Central department schemes. Since each Central department clears proposals on its own priorities, the resulting state and district plans do not always offer region-specific solutions or have a unified focus. The district plan is often just an accumulation of plans of various agencies with no detailing of an inter-related sequence of execution of activities. Apart from the scores of schemes emanating from the Agriculture Department, there are programmes of other ministries and departments concerned with micro credit financing; major, minor and micro irrigation; wasteland development and forest area projects. Things are somewhat better where the state component of the total plan expenditure on agriculture is high, but this is getting rarer.
However, it is important that the integration should not remain restricted to the Agriculture Department alone but should also extend to interventions of other departments– such as those related to land development, rural development, irrigation, and credit schemes.
The basic objective of agriculture is to optimise the output from available land, keeping track of environmental concerns and maximizing benefits to farmers.
A holistic approach cutting across various ministries and departments is needed between the specialised units in the Department of Agriculture; the Agriculture, Forest and Wasteland Development Board; micro finance institutions like the newly created Jal Shakti banks ( still at conceptual levels) and the private sector; government nurseries and private providers of seeds and fertilizers, suppliers of agriculture instruments, sprinklers and drip irrigation instruments; as well as with subsidy schemes in this area and programmes for the empowerment of women in agriculture . All these agencies and schemes will have their specific criteria, focus, priorities and norms even when the objective is the same. Thus the challenge is to harmonise all these and evolve a system to bring in convergence between these inputs and have an integrated plan with both horizontal and vertical linkages. The need for monitoring cannot be undervalued as an essential part of resource management. The monitoring has to ensure that the resources are not just optimised but utilised as per seasonality.
Given below are the various components that need to be addressed for developing a holistic approach to agriculture.
Land: The first step is to map the cultivable land and the potentially cultivable land in the district and to list the present agriculture practices. The listing should include land under cultivation (cropwise)/ barren land/ land under forest actual coverage. This is not a difficult job and can be completed within 15 days as the statistics are already available with the district’s statistical officer, planning officer and the office of deputy director for agriculture. The Windows-based mapping tool gramDRISHTI can be valuable as it enables the user to translate any information available in Excel sheets into a special display. Where land records are not computerized the consolidated village-wise information covering details of land, crop sown, source of irrigation, etc. can be easily fed into an Excel sheet in a decentralized manner so that it is then available for informed and systematic decision making. This activity needs convergence between the departments of Land Records and Agriculture.
Land for landless: Several efforts to distribute ceiling surplus land, land under bhoodan and wasteland to the landless have failed in their objective. The beneficiary leaves the land and goes back to working as an agriculture labourer or he sells off the land or it gets occupied by the previous land owner or people with clout. The reason for this failure is lack of convergence. The activity of allotting land was seemingly considered an end in itself. It is essential to converge this action with training the new land owner, land improvement activities, and hand holding for at least four to five crop cycles by giving him a mini-kit of inputs and establishing market contacts. Only then will it lead to sustainable livelihood for the beneficiary. This requires convergence between revenue agencies, agriculture extension agencies, credit agencies, coordination with other poverty alleviation and development schemes and also with marketing. The software helps the planners and implementers of this activity find the schemes available for each component and successfully converge them for execution.
Land shaping: The land needs to shaped and treated under a scientific plan to ensure that there is no water logging and there is optimum utilization of available water. This should be part of the watershed activity as each land comes under a watershed project. The fund availability should not be restricted to that available for the watershed project alone but dovetailed with employment schemes. The individual can work on his/ her own land and get wages for his work under employment schemes. Watershed itself needs convergence as it is handled by different agencies — the Ministry of Rural Development, Waste Land Development, Agriculture, Soil Conservation agencies etc. Employment guarantee schemes are currently part of infrastructure development i.e. labour intensive asset-building exercises. Land development too not only provides the beneficiary immediate employment but also develops his land and thus ensures him a source of increased income for the future. Under the Mahatma Gandhi Employment Guarantee Scheme once an individual registers in the Panchayat indicating his/her readiness to take on unskilled work, it is mandatory to provide employment within 5 km within 15 days. The best employment for a person with land can be in his/her own land or own watershed. This approach, executed in a systematic manner, not only ensures that the beneficiaries’ gets wages but also enables them to develop their own assets, thus triggering further sources of employment.
Soil conservation: It is necessary to focus on soil conservation measures both for environmental concerns and long-term sustainability. Unfortunately, there are few experts on soil conservation at the grassroots level, where soil conservation measures are unfortunately seen in the narrow sense of just building structures. The result is wasteful and unproductive resource spending. A systematic convergent plan drawn and executed under the technical supervision of an expert will optimize the outcome. The few available local experts should be converged and used by different agencies, which is feasible if the plan is drawn not independently for each agency but by adopting the convergence model.
Cropping pattern: Unfortunately after the Green Revolution no systematic efforts were made by research agencies and the extension staff to educate and inform farmers about the crops most suitable for a specific kind of soil and land. That would have been the right time to incorporate the concept of an Agriculture doctor who analyses soil type, the location of the land, its slope, climatic conditions etc. and then recommends the right crop and the cropping pattern. This would have optimized the effects of the Green Revolution. Instead, this kind of decision was left to the farmers who either blindly followed what others around them were doing or got lured by the economics advocated by seed manufacturing agencies or succumbed to the market forces without any systematic analysis. This is the main reason of heavy indebtedness among farmers. Holistic approach gives a platform for initiating such a process either in the government sector or by private-public partnership. The Agriculture doctor prescribes what is best suited and then the components can be tapped by converging the schemes to ensure horizontal linkages, holistic planning and, most important, optimum use of the resources available for the best suitable and sustainable outcomes.
Combination with allied activities: The Resource Convergence Mantra facilitates systematic mixed farming in terms of combining crops with poultry, piggery, and fisheries, depending on the land and other factors. The Northeast pattern of combining piggeries in the basement of a house on stilts and horticulture requires careful planning and complete information about the gestation period. For example, while growing fruits with a long gestation period, famers should be advised to also grow intermediate crops. Thus a farmer who introduces an orange crop, which bears fruits in four to sevenyears, should additionally plant, say, coriander in year one and papaya the next and so on…till the orange starts fruiting. This will ensure him a regular income in the intermediate period as well. But planning has to be specific for each land holding. At the execution level it should not be just statistics but it should be planning by name and face to ensure sustainable outputs and surplus income to farmers.
Training of farmers: Proper training of the farmers has to be a part of any initiative or new methods introduced. The extension staff should take the farmer into confidence before either introducing a new crop or a better practice and follow that up with complete information, orientation and training. I would like to illustrate this with the excellent work done by the village extension officer in the District of Raipur when I was a probationer there in 1983. Thanks to his initiatives and efforts the village had the second highest productivity of paddy per acre in the country. He started off by first targeting farmers with large land holdings, introducing them to better seeds, agriculture practices and inputs. The following year he took the seeds from the first lot of farmers and gave them to the others, thus making the whole village a model for best agricultural practices for paddy cultivation. Such a systematic approach needs to be monitored and encouraged. The training, which can be done on demonstration plots, must also include confidence building and should empower them to take decisions on the play of market forces and commercial advocacy targeted at them for a particular kind of agriculture practice or specific seeds, chemical fertilizers, oil seeds, pulses etc. They should also be able to access targeted schemes. There are several agriculture extension schemes run by the Ministries of Agriculture and Rural Development, which have provisions for training self-help groups (farmers SHGs can use this fund). For example, the Department of Horticulture has demonstrations for best practices in growing specified crops. There is also training by lending institutions and by private manufacturers of products. Some training programmes include interphase workshops with the experts using modern means of communication and media at the Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK).
Availability of good quality seed/ saplings: There is an urgent need for new highquality seeds which are resistant to diseases and give the desired yields in several crops, especially soya bean (Madhya Pradesh) and cotton (Maharashtra). The KVKs and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research should not only address these specific needs but also target their research observations to the concerned farmers. The ongoing debate on genetic seeds needs to be explained to the farmers. In fact, it should be made mandatory for selling agencies to declare the pros and cons of their products and for seed manufactures to guarantee insurance in case of failure so that there is some level of accountability.
The seed production programme need not be funded just from resources of the Agriculture Department but also from employmentgeneration schemes of other departments of the government and private sector since all these schemes generate employment. These include Integrated Pest Management (IPT)demonstrations, targeted schemes for better seeds in pulses and maize, distribution of mini-kits for spices and floriculture seeds, Annapoorna Yojana to enable exchange of seeds (give low yielding and get better variety) for SC/ST farmers, and horticulture top working for ber (also known as Indian jujube – budding of ber ensures that the next crop itself is of a very high yield and quality).
Similarly when there is limited funding for a scheme for a specific crop or component (grafting, budding, top dressing) gaps can be filled by dovetailing it with supplementary and complementary schemes and tapping other resources. Most executing agencies don’t do this as they are caught in compartmentalized mindsets. The holistic model guards against this by linking each thrust activity with schemes that supplement and complement the objective. This utilization of optimal inputs ensures an increase in productivity.
End of Part 1, Part 2 will be published on July 7, Tuesday. Dr. Aruna Sharma has served as Secretary, Govt. of India. She is a Development Economist and served as Secretary, Ministry of Steel; Secretary, Electronics and Panchayati Raj. She also held charge of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj in Madhya Pradesh state government. She conceived and launched governance software like Samagra, now operational in 10 states and coordinated for Direct Benefit Transfer. She was member in 5 member high level committee of RBI for deepening digital payments.