Transform India146;s heart

India's central region has always fascinated me. So beautiful, so culturally rich, so endowed in resources and, yet, so poor. Rice yields ar...

India8217;s central region has always fascinated me. So beautiful, so culturally rich, so endowed in resources and, yet, so poor. Rice yields are around a tonne a hectare. In the economic history of the world, urbanisation begins when yields go above seven to eight quintals. So rice yields here are not very different from the days of Ancient Rome. I have this dream of India becoming an economic superpower when, in the central Deccan agro-climatic zone, rice yields touch the level achieved in Haryana in the early seventies, say a little more than a tonne and a half. The area involved is so large that if this was to happen, so many people would be well fed and that would have its own dynamic 8212; particularly, if the people concerned are Adivasis.

In Bhopal, I find out that rice yields 8212; taking good and bad years into account 8212; are still around a tonne. But there is no need to break our hearts over this. For one thing, the rice bowl has gone to Chattisgarh and yields there have risen and in other areas many new things are happening. When agriculture begins to diversify, the area under grain goes down. In about a third of India8217;s cropped area, either farmers have switched away from foodgrains by ten percentage points or more, or land under foodgrains is less than forty per cent. One would have thought that this would happen in agriculturally prosperous, high rainfall or irrigated areas, for it is only well fed farmers who switch over to cash crops and tree crops. No, this is happening in many cases in the plateau regions. Many of these areas are in Madhya Pradesh and the districts carved away from it.

One story is soya. The late B. Sivaraman, an architect of India8217;s green revolution, who had wanted the better ICS officers to travel and see all the fallow lands in the valleys of the Deccan Plateau, had hit upon the idea of growing soya during the kharif season. Some villages did grow it but nobody would buy. In the food shortage years of the sixties and seventies, the only place you would see soya was in lunches in Yojana Bhavan. But, as oilseeds couldn8217;t keep up with the demand for oil, some factories came up and once the collectors were told not to jail people for stocking soya, the idea spread. Yields were low, but this was a bee in the bonnet of R.S. Paroda and he pushed the technology. Soya yields, earlier less than half a tonne, are now more than a tonne. There has lately been some slackening because of the large quantities of edible oil imports but, on the whole, soya is a success story.

Milk and tree crops are coming up. In Bastar, there are a lot of mango trees. Very few people go there to buy them. So the Adivasis make amchur and sell it. But they used iron knives and that spoilt the colour of the amchur so they got a low price. A bright collector gave them stainless steel knives which meant a light coloured amchur and a higher price. The problem is always covering the last mile. They are now asking a private corporation in exports to help them market the so called minor forest produce as organic products for which demand is going up in an environmentally sensitive world.

When you get your act together at the lowest level, the buzzword is convergence. A young academic at the politics department of Bombay University, decided to check in a few states if, in the districts, they knew what the sahebs in the state capitals were saying. As far as primary education and small water projects were concerned, he found that in the districts in MP he went to, the local leaders had a pretty good idea about the change Digvijay Singh wanted.

Covering the last mile in water is important if you want to grow cash and tree crops. The other thing is to meet the food needs of the poor farmer and the Adivasi. If that doesn8217;t happen, he will continue to grow his ragi 8212; however low the yield. They are, I understand, using grain banks, which are possible in the new public distribution setup at the village level to get over the insecurity of the food needs of the Adivasi, so that he can do what he is best at 8212; sustain and live off the jungle. There are bound to be problems, but if we have the wisdom to solve them and persist in Bhopal and in Delhi, the world is our oyster. They would have also done it without rice yields going above a tonne a hectare and I would have been proved wrong. Isn8217;t it nice to see Adivasis proving a Wharton-trained economist wrong?