Grain of Wisdom

India must rev up its foodgrain production to sustain a 4 % growth rate in agriculture, as per the next Plan projections

The Indian growth story, as has been stressed time and again, requires a 4.1 per cent growth rate in agriculture and allied activities. To sustain this growth rate, large productivity gaps need to be narrowed down for meeting the country’s foodgrain demand, according to the Agriculture Ministry projections for the next Plan period.

A presentation on the demand and supply projections for 2011-12 and 2020-21, carried out by the National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research (NCAP), spells out the need for ramping up the current growth rate of all foodgrains from 0.7 per cent to 2.21 per cent to meet the increasing demand of food, feed and processed food.

The projections estimate that the country would require 296.8 million tonnes of foodgrains (cereals and pulses) during 2020-21 as against 208.6 million tonnes produced at the end of 2005-6, provided the growth rate is maintained at 7 per cent during this period and the cultivation area remains roughly constant.

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This means the country would have to produce about 42.3 per cent more foodgrains by 2020 to keep pace with the increasing consumption due to rising incomes and growing pace of urbanisation. Considering the constraints of land availability and the growing population, meeting these targets is no mean task. It would involve raising wheat productivity levels by 23 per cent and the rice productivity levels by about 44 per cent. While these levels for cereals may seem modest, the productivity jump for pulses is more than 100 per cent, an area that would require government’s attention.

Compounding the problem is the fact that there is only a limited area of cultivation which can be expanded. So the expansion of area for one crop, say wheat, would require crop substitution, reducing the area for the other crop. This would leave the government with no option but to look for productivity jumps to meet the targets.

“Keeping in view the dynamic equilibrium between the area under cultivation and production through crop substitution, a focus on targeted productivity jump would be a more effective tool to match the demand-supply projections in an efficient manner,” says P.K. Joshi, director, NCAP. Joshi points out that there are several regions in the country which have a good scope for improving productivity in foodgrains, while a crop-specific and region-specific focus has the potential to deliver the desired results.

With agriculture receiving the much desired attention of late, the Agriculture Ministry has started devising crop-wise and region-wise strategies to achieve these productivity jumps. Then again, meeting these gains means massive efforts at strengthening the agriculture extension system in the country.