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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The coming crisis for rain-dependent India by M Rajshekhar

The coming crisis for rain-dependent India by M Rajshekhar

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published Published on Jun 14, 2011   modified Modified on Jun 14, 2011

It's that time of the year when Kishore Lal Singh's eyes almost involuntarily scan the skies. The monsoons are coming. In the months ahead, for this Bhil farmer growing cotton, maize and soya south of the Malwa plateau in Madhya Pradesh, life will again hang on a knife's edge. If it rains well, his two bighas (about four basketball courts) of cotton will yield 1,000 kg. If not, he will get no more than 100 kg. Not enough to even recover costs.

Chintaman Chowdhury, another farmer in Malwa, explains the economics of agriculture. With two crops a year, the maximum annual income a farmer who plants soya and wheat can expect is about Rs 20,000 per acre - if the rains are normal. In his village, one in three farmers has less than two acres, and about 58% farm between two and five acres. It is a picture of poverty. And even this is further threatened by a crisis that is growing by the day. It's the same story across India. Water availability can make a pronounced difference to agricultural output and standard of living. Areas fed by canals fare better than those that rely on rains. Unfortunately , such irrigated areas account for only 40% of India's net sown area.

The remaining 60%, which accounts for a substantial part of agricultural output, is raindependent . Today, farmers in rain-dependent areas are being pushed against a wall. The Green Revolution was designed around growing high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, which needed plenty of water and chemical inputs. "The entire agricultural research framework, incentive structure, price support, input subsidies, extension system were designed to 'flow' along with irrigation," says A Ravindra Babu, director, Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN ), a non-governmental organisation working on dryland agriculture.


Over time, even farmers in unirrigated areas cobbled together their own water supply - mostly through groundwater - and switched to the green revolution framework. But now, as groundwater levels collapse, agricultural soils weaken and rainfall gets erratic , the green revolution seems to have run its course in these unirrigated areas.

The Green Revolution...

This dilemma is acutest in regions that don't receive adequate rainfall. Rain-dependent areas can be broadly split into two: 'drylands' , which receive less than 750 mm of rain a year; and rainfed areas, which receive more than 750 mm. Comprising arid and semi-arid ecosystems, drylands stretch from Gujarat in the west till Eastern Madhya Pradesh; and from Rajasthan till the southern tip of India. To reduce their vulnerability to rains, farmers here used to grow jowar , bajra and pulses. While lowyielding , such crops were less affected by variations in rainfall. It was a 'safe' existence. Farmers invested little in their fields. Why invest if returns are uncertain? In the same field, they planted multiple crops.

For instance, Jowar or pulses, both drought-resistant , would be planted alongside wheat, which gave high yields in normal rains. They also maintained livestock or, if forests were in the vicinity , gathered minor forest produce. The green revolution came in the sixties. Tasked with ensuring food security, it pushed high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of wheat and rice over jowar, bajra et al. It began in the floodplains of the north. Where, as canals came up, farmers, realising rainfall risk was a thing of the past, switched to HYVs. In the drylands, the story evolved differently. The green revolution came here in bits and pieces. The seeds and fertilisers reached. So did the exhortations to farmers to adopt 'modern' farming. What did not reach was water. Predictable water supply is something the farmers created for themselves. When electricity came, they invested in groundwater pumps.

What followed was transformative . In Malwa (MP), for instance , till the early-1970 s, farmers grew jowar during the rains and Malwi Ghehu , a local wheat variety, after that. Once the pumps came in, farming became a yearlong activity. Cash crops like soya displaced jowar. HYVs of wheat displaced Malwi Ghehu. Below the Malwa plateau, the same set of changes played out more recently, as groundwater pumps came just eight years ago. This is the story across India. Groundwater (tube wells) has been the mainstay of addition to irrigation resources.


According to a Planning Commission report, titled 'Synopsis of Groundwater Resources in India' , by Himanshu Kulkarni , P.S. Vijay Shankar and Sunderajan Krishnan, in 1960-61 , canals and tanks accounted for 61% of non-rain water for irrigation, compared to 0.6% for tube wells. In 2002-03 , the share of canals and tanks was down to 33%, while tube wells had increased to 39%. "Of the addition to irrigated area of 25.7 million hectares between 1970 and 2000, groundwater accounted for over 85%. At present, about 61% of the irrigation is from groundwater ," says the report. That story is now beginning to wind down, jeopardising the shift made by farmers in dryland areas and raising serious livelihood and food-security issues.

...is Winding Down

In parts of Malwa, for example, groundwater levels have plunged from 50 ft in the 1970s to 700 ft now. The Planning Commission study, which is an unnerving read, says the crisis is acute in six states. As per the study, if the ratio of groundwater extraction to groundwater recharge is less than 70%, it is considered safe; 70-90 %, semicritical ; 90-100 %, critical; and more than 100%, overexploited. Between 1995 and 2004, the proportion of districts in semi-critical , critical and over-exploited has grown from 5% of the agricultural area and 7% of the population to 33% and 35% respectively .

The report says that the "level of groundwater extraction is unsustainable" in Punjab, Rajasthan and Haryana; and that Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and UP are "fast approaching that stage" . These six states accounted for half the foodgrain production in 2008-09 . There are other problems. Soils are weakening. Badhia Naval Singh farms 8 bighas at Mansinghpura village in Bagli tehsil. Earlier, he says, if he pulled out a tuft of grass, he would see earthworms in the soil. "Dikhaye dena ab band ho gaye hain (They do not show up anymore )," he says. Imbalanced fertiliser use is skewing the chemical composition of soils, which are hardening and retaining less moisture. Says the 11th five-year plan document: "Nearly two-thirds of our farmlands are either degraded or sick."

Rainfall itself is becoming more and more unpredictable. While talking to Shagan Sanaf Chotu, a larger farmer in Mansinghpura, it suddenly starts raining, quite heavily . It is the middle of May. "But it never rains in May," says Chotu. Even as all this changes, hedging across livelihoods is less feasible now. The green revolution increased yields partly by shortening plants' height. This reduced fodder for livestock. Encroachments into village commons have reduced grazing spaces for cattle. As forests retreated, villagers traditionally dependent on minor forest produce have one less fallback option. In all, farmers have no option but to invest in agriculture to keep their heads above water - even though it now yields diminishing returns.


Two years ago, Singh borrowed Rs 1 lakh for a tube well. Since the local bank doesn't lend for tube wells, he borrowed from fellow villagers , at 36% interest. "It will take us five years to repay this loan," his wife says acerbically. "Till then, we will live on mirchi roti." What will exacerbate matters is climate change, whose worst sufferers are expected to be India's drylands and sub-Saharan Africa. The question is: how does one equip dryland farmers to deal with heightened weather and rainfall risk without pushing them back to the low risk, low output subsistence trap?

Vacuum In Research

Badhia says the HYVs are "nazuk" (delicate). They give a good yield only if all the conditions are favourable . He says older varieties were more resilient but also that he can't go back to them. "Mandis want cotton with long staples - about 32-38 mm," he says. "The old varieties were 14-15 mm." B Venkateswarlu, director of the Central Research Institute for Dryland Areas (CRIDA), says short-stapled cotton was used to spin dhotis, but this is the age of readymades. "The spinning mills have shifted to long-staple cotton, which is easy to spin and more durable . The farmer has no choice." That is one problem.

Farmers' need for cash, with the need to buy farm inputs, send kids to school, etc, is greater than before. But the market wants attributes that traditional crops lack. Which raises another obvious question: why aren't better varieties available? There hasn't been enough research . The central body for coordinating agricultural research in India is the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR). For the longest time, most of its research was on rice and wheat - the focus of the green revolution. Yields of rice and wheat increased even as those of coarse cereals stagnated. "In Punjab, Haryana and UP, R&D into two crops will take care of 80% of the land and farmers," says Ramesh Chand, director, National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy (NCAP). "In dryland areas , you need R&D in 10-12 crops to reach out to a similar proportion of farmers and land."

Only in the nineties did yields of jowar, bajra and maize begin to climb again. But, this has not been accompanied by consumer demand . Diets have changed, partly due to affluence, partly due to the PDS changing people's tastes. Pulses and oilseeds, stapes of dryland agriculture, continue to stagnate. Worse, state agricultural universities (SAUs), which are best placed to undertake locally relevant research, face a cash crunch. "ICAR has 4,000 scientists, the SAUs have 20,000," says Chand. "But the money that comes in goes entirely into salaries. Money for research has almost vanished." Says the 11th Plan: "SAUs are so poorly funded by their state governments that some are in chronic overdraft, only a quarter are accredited, and almost all rely on ICAR for research funding." Their growing dependence on ICAR has had another unintended consequence.

"As the country tried to modernise agriculture, ICAR ignored the questions around rural society, natural resource allocation, even local agri-ecological conditions , and focused only on how to increase yields," says Rajeswari Raina , who studies agricultural research at NISTADS (National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies). "In the process , it distanced itself from local problems and local solutions." Today , as the dependence of SAUs on ICAR increases, their research priorities are swinging as well. This is the legacy of the green revolution . Our irrigation infrastructure , research institutions and procurement are geared to support the irrigated areas.

To help farmers in rain-dependant areas, India will have to reset those incentives to encourage cropping patterns that are better attuned to local ecologies. That might mean including coarse cereals in the PDS. Or, growing less rice in Punjab. The state currently gets 550 mm of rain, but needs about 1,500 mm of rain to grow rice and wheat. It makes up the deficit through irrigation and groundwater . "This is unsustainable," says JS Samra of the National Rainfed Area Authority . "Rice should be taken to the rainfed areas of the east." Those are the kind of realignments needed to ensure farmers like Kishore Lal Singh stay in the fields.

The Economic Times, 14 June, 2011, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/8845170.cms?prtpage=1

Tagged with: Agriculture



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