Still a gamble on the rains

When we talk of salvaging Indian agriculture from the present crisis, we must realise that the problem has several dimensions, including those of technology and terms of trade. If one carefully analyses the “success” of the so-called “green revolution”, it is apparent that it was been confined to Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, and to Andhra Pradesh to an extent. Although they produce only a fourth of the total foodgrain produced in the country, these states enjoy the benefit of the minimum support price arrangement since almost 75 per cent of the grain they produced is procured by the government. The richer farmers of these states have always been the main beneficiaries of this procurement policy. In other words, the terms of trade were not in favour of the rest of the 75 per cent of the farming community spread across the length and breadth of the country.

The same skewed pattern applies to the high input technology practiced by these farmers. The “hot spots” of the country — mainly the dryland tracts of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, and so on, have by and large not benefitted from New Delhi’s developmental impetus, be it in providing irrigation or infrastructural facilities.

There is, then, a strong case to be made for shifting the focus of agriculture from the so-called green revolution belt to the hot spots of India. And deficient rainfall only reinforces this contention. Another important dimension of the re-orientation of the planning process is to critically re-evaluate the relevance of the technology dished out to the farmer. Without exception, most of the farm practices followed in India were the extension of experimentation in the experimental farm. Experimental farms are basically artifacts, functioning without any constraints and far removed from the realities of the impoverished farmer.

A recent study by the Hyderabad-based Centre for Economic and Social Studies has clearly brought out the crucial fact that the spate of suicides by farmers in hundreds in Andhra, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala and even in Punjab — the “cradle” of the green revolution — is due to failure of the technology provided to the farmer, the ubiquitous “package of practices” dished out by the agricultural scientist, based on information generated on the experimental farm. It is not due to the lack of availability of rural credit and indebtedness alone, as is being widely made out. Undoubtedly, the lack of rural credits aggravates the problem, but it is not the prime cause for these tragedies. Besides, there has been no real breakthrough in farm technology for a very long time, be it in the production of superior crop varieties or soil management techniques.

The need of the hour is to generate viable information from the farmers’ fields itself, rather than transpose what the scientist does in the constraints-free experimental farm on the constraints-filled farmers’ fields. Indian agriculture cannot be salvaged by the innumerable commissions, knowledge centres, virtual universities, and so on and so forth, as long as the farmer is not at the centre of all attention. Instead of the top-down approach, we must re-orient ourselves for a bottom up mindset.

The writer is member, High Power Committee for Agricultural Reforms, Government of Kerala