Land and Man

Indian statisticians do a thankless job. In the present, they can only go by what the sahibs tell them. Later when the facts come in they tuck them away in their reports and get the short end of the stick.

Indian statisticians do a thankless job. In the present, they can only go by what the sahibs tell them. Later when the facts come in they tuck them away in their reports and get the short end of the stick. The press berates them for changing so often, the sahibs say they are wrong. The venerable Economic and Statistical Adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture brings out a gem of a book Agricultural Statistics at A Glance. The latest one for 2005 is beautifully printed and on page 176 the last line says that in 2002/03, the last year for which they have a number, the Net Sown Area in India was 132.86 million hectares. An innocuous number you would say but thereby hangs a tale. Another occasion when the Indian farmer has proved me wrong, unfortunate for me for I don8217;t think the editors will excuse me for being truthfully wrong too many times. But the number is as unfortunate for the kisan, as for me.

My first job in the Planning Commission was in 1974 to make the country8217;s five-year plan and the then PM wanted us to ensure that the country had enough food. Think tanks the world over said that India would be unable to feed itself. We mined every morsel of information available on Indian agriculture and said that when water was available, the farmer double cropped and used the new technologies which were short duration. Land under cultivation was rising by around a third of 1 per cent every year and with double cropping, or using the same land more than once rising, land under crops was increasing by two thirds of 1 per cent every year. If we were to grow at 3.5 per cent every year, that kind of land growth would take care of around a sixth of the growth and for the rest we needed fertilizer, seeds and so on. We were right and India went on to food self reliance.

In the 80s we grew at the required rate, but land growth halved so technology took the slack. Then in the 90s net sown area stopped growing. People like me predicted that it would be stuck at 141 million hectares and the entire growth need would have to come from using the same land more intensively and a higher contribution from technology. We would, we hoped, harvest water and improve irrigation deliveries. In every region a strategy of water harvesting was known, ponds deepening, taking canal water to the farm, groundwater use and so on. The need and methods were known, a first cut plan was presented to Parliament by Rajiv Gandhi in 1989. It did not happen. The contribution from technology has not gone down. If at all it has marginally improved, but the increase in sustainable irrigation is not there. In fact canal irrigation as a whole started falling. So the 90s output growth of a little less than 2 per cent came entirely from technology. In a table popularised by a book coauthored with Uma Lele of the World Bank on sustainable forestry in India the constant 141 million hectares of net area sown goes on till 2012 and with irrigation improving double cropping goes up to around 40 per cent from less than a third. It didn8217;t happen but bad news comes in droves. For the first time in India8217;s economic history we are told that net area sown, rising slowly earlier and constant since the early 90s has gone down by eight million hectares. The severity of the blow will take time to sink in. But time India does not have. A few years ago I had warned that we are getting close to the kind of land and water shortage East Asian societies like China, Japan and Korea have grappled with, but have built up institutions through the centuries to cope. I had argued that we need to make haste. People like me were wrong in predicting that our cropped area would remain constant, but are right in the warning we gave. The Ganga and the Cauvery flow freely in every Indian8217;s mind, but the free lunch in land and water is over.