Agriculture: Agriculture in India employs close to 42 percent of India’s workforce, feeds the entire nation, and is best positioned to alleviate problems of malnutrition and hunger. According to agriculture experts, Ashok Gulati and Shweta Saini, the sector needs to grow not just for those employed in it, but also for the economy as a whole.
In a recent Springer Nature publication, Gulati and Saini presented a state-specific strategy for six Indian states including Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Odisha. According to the study, the three common factors that explained most of the agrarian growth in the six states were:
- access to infrastructure, primarily irrigation, and roads
- diversification to high-value agricultural products like fruit and vegetables (F&V), and allied activities like dairy and poultry
- price incentives, or favourable terms of trade.
Bringing markets closer to farmers and increasing the efficiency of the value-chains were cited as important factors for agricultural growth in Gujarat (mainly cotton, groundnut, livestock), Madhya Pradesh (wheat, soybean, pulses), Odisha (livestock and F&V), and Bihar (maize and livestock). Ensuring timely access to sufficient irrigation and uninterrupted power supply also contributed to the high performances of states such as Gujarat and Punjab.
As part of the roadmap, the authors make a case for states to move beyond the existing production-centric approach to a value-chain approach with a focus on Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs). They stress on the need to have public investment in basic infrastructure like roads, markets, power supplies, and research. In addition, they suggest that subsidies be rationalised, and direct income transfers to farmers be explored.
Read this article to know what’s next for agriculture in India.