Against the grain

The prime minister8217;s observations on agriculture and rural incomes should be understood in the political context he and almost all other politicians operate in. That context allows plenty of innovative thinking on how to improve agriculture but it is less tolerant of ideas that start with the premise that farming as we know it has to radically transform, both for its own sake and for the sake of economic modernisation. This is the reason it is hard to find even enlightened administrators 8212; the PM is a fine example of that group 8212; argue that the basic problem with agriculture is that it cannot support as many people as are dependant on it now. Or that when a huge majority of landholdings are small and marginal 0-2 hectares, the farm sector8217;s future cannot lie in trying to improve incomes in general.

Therefore a sustained, policy-induced shift out of farming to other professions is needed. Simultaneously, production and ownership patterns in farming need to change. The contract farming model being practised successfully in states like Punjab is something every serious agricultural policy-maker must look into. As our columnist today argues, a problem for Indian policy-making in this area has been the 8220;obsession8221; about land as a factor of production. The rural poor need not and actually cannot use only land to improve their incomes. Labour, capital and entrepreneurship must be seen as equally, if not more, important agents of change.

It is easy to be pessimistic about the possibility of such a shift in thinking among the political class. But think back to the early reform days. When Manmohan Singh as finance minister started to reform industry and then the financial sector, he could probably not have counted on a single CM, from whatever party, to understand what he was doing. Now CMs, cutting across parties, are driving the reform agenda. If now Dr Singh as prime minister were to gently discard the conventional wisdom on agriculture, who knows, the language on farm policy may change a few years later.