Ashok Gulati

Existing government programmes cannot provide gainful employment opportunities to migrants at their native places.

With Covid’s second wave assuming alarming proportions, it’s high time there is a meaningful action plan, based on robust data, to alleviate the problems of migrants.

Technological solutions to make rice and sugarcane cultivators use water more sustainably can work if there are right incentives, and agri-input pricing is on the right track.

It requires a diversified approach that takes into account peculiarities and constraints of states, investment in infrastructure and linking farmer producer groups with markets.

A closer examination of the scheme in terms of achieving its objectives of price stabilisation, reveals that Operation Green is in slow motion, and nowhere near achieving its objectives.

Free power, highly subsidised urea and open-ended procurement have become a deadly cocktail that are eating away the natural wealth of Punjab.

Overall, the expenditure on agri-R&D needs to be doubled or even tripled in next three years, if growth in agriculture has to provide food security at a national level and subsidies on food and fertilisers need to be contained.

An optimal agri-food policy should look at issues pertinent to not only the short run but also try to address medium to long-term challenges.

The art of policymaking is to balance the interest of producers and consumers within reasonable financial resources.

For this to happen, political leadership is needed to help rebuild trust among countries on trade and food security after the disruption caused by US-China trade tensions, and the inconclusive outcome of the WTO’s 2018 ministerial conference in Buenos Aires.

Can the Centre and the Punjab government join hands to find a sustainable solution to farmers’ incomes and also save depleting water, soil, and air? Only then can they make Punjab great again.

This communication gap was fully exploited by some political parties and social activists, who themselves are facing an existentialist threat and believe that the Narendra Modi government can do no good for this country.

The irony of agricultural pollution is that taxpayers are essentially paying for it through a system of subsidies that actually motivates the very behaviours that drive the agricultural emissions that they breathe.

Food staples are not dense on minerals and vitamins, but they do provide a broad range of essential minerals and vitamins — a base which needs to be strengthened by non-staple foods.

Patience and professionalism will bring rich rewards in due course, not noisy politics.

More sustainable solutions lie in augmenting productivity, diversifying to high-value crops, and shifting people out of agriculture to high productivity jobs elsewhere. But no one talked about these during these agitations.

The Congress is leading the charge. But its manifesto for the 2019 general election said, “Congress will repeal the Agricultural Produce Market Committee Act and make trade in agricultural produce — including exports and inter-state trade — free from all restrictions”.

For “POSHAN Maah” to contribute towards the holistic nourishment of children and a malnutrition free India by 2030, the government needs to address the multi-dimensional determinants of malnutrition on an urgent basis.

The “Uberisation model” could make tractor services perfectly divisible, accessible and affordable even by small holders without owning the machine.

The bottom line is that India needs to not only spatially integrate its agri-markets (one nation, one market) but also integrate them temporally — spot and futures markets have to converge.

Major rationalisation and pruning of subsidies can go a long way in financing a development plan for eastern India as well as the new demands for reinforcing defence in the wake of Chinese aggression.

The private sector is our strength. The only thing the government has to do is to unshackle them from the chains of controls and webs of unnecessary regulations. They will make an Atmanirbhar Bharat.

On the agri-imports front, the biggest item is edible oils — worth about $10 billion (more than 15 mt). This is where there is a need to create “aatma nirbharta”, not by levying high import duties, but by creating a competitive advantage through augmenting productivity and increasing the recovery ratio of oil from oilseeds.

Let the Modi government listen to its own chief economic advisor, what his team had to say in The Economic Survey: Reduce the coverage under PDS; link issue price to at least half of the procurement price; and move gradually towards cash transfers.