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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Agrarian crisis: Bias against agriculture needs to go for revival; higher investment, change in attitude towards sector a must -Prasanna Mohanty

Agrarian crisis: Bias against agriculture needs to go for revival; higher investment, change in attitude towards sector a must -Prasanna Mohanty

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published Published on Dec 16, 2018   modified Modified on Dec 16, 2018
-Firstpost.com

The first reaction of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Central government after the party's debacle in the Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan seems to be to waive farm loans, which is a telling comment on the state of the agrarian distress in India and the need to pay immediate attention to the crisis. This was expected, too, since 90 percent of the rural constituencies in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and 70 percent in Rajasthan are agricultural, where the ruling party suffered a huge setback. Repeated farmers' protest marches may have evoked little response, but an electoral debacle will not be, particularly when the 2019 general elections are looming large.

But farm loan waiver is, at best, an emergency relief that will do little to address the distress in the agricultural economy. What is needed is revived interest and investment in this most crucial sector of India's economy, which provides employment to nearly 50 percent of the total work force and supports more than two-third of the country's population. Official data shows that public investment in agriculture has remained between 0.3 and 0.4 percent of the GDP (based on 2011-12 series at market price) between 2011-12 and 2016-17, which is grossly disproportionate to its significance in the economy. The total investment, both public and private, has also been declining steadily — from 3.1 percent of the GDP in 2011-12 to 2.2 percent in 2016-17. This trend needs to be reversed, but for that to happen, the general sentiment and economic discourse surrounding investment in agriculture first needs to change.

What it means is that referring to investment and relief to the farm sector as "subsidy" — something that is a burden on the economic and hence should be eliminated or reduced — should change and be replaced with something more positive like "fiscal stimulus", which was what the fiscal support to the industry was described as during the post-2008 economic crisis.

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Firstpost.com, 13 December, 2018, https://www.firstpost.com/india/agrarian-crisis-bias-against-agriculture-needs-to-go-for-revival-higher-investment-change-in-attitude-towards-sector-a-must-5724991.ht


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