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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The culture of freebies must give way to the use of technologies in farm -Neeraj Kaushal

The culture of freebies must give way to the use of technologies in farm -Neeraj Kaushal

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published Published on Jan 9, 2018   modified Modified on Jan 9, 2018
-The Economic Times

Politicians in India firmly believe that the woes of farmers can be solved with freebies: free electricity, free water, farm loan waivers, fertilisers and seed subsidies, minimum support prices, etc. Little attention is paid to what really ails Indian agriculture: low productivity. From rice to wheat to coarse grains and pulses, from cash crops to food crops, Indian agriculture is punctured with very low productivity.

Let's start with rice. India's rice cultivation area is the highest in the world. It is also the world's second-largest producer of rice. Given these glowing statistics, outsiders may assume that India must surely have certain special advantages in growing rice that other countries do not — that we must have figured out the most productive technology of cultivating rice and other countries should replicate our model.

Rice and Shine

Alas, they would be wrong in their assumptions. Rice guzzles water and India is a water-scarce country. States that devote large proportions of land to paddy cultivation have dangerously low water tables. India has one of the lowest productivity of rice in the world. In short, India has no special advantage in growing rice, and other countries should be advised to stay away from the India model.

China produces roughly a third more rice than India but uses about two-thirds of India's land area. Consequently, China's rice productivity is close to 7 tonnes per hectare versus India's 4. Australia's is 10 tonnes per hectare, followed by Egypt and the US with 8.5.

This raises the question: why, despite low productivity and water shortages, are Indian farmers more likely to grow rice than farmers elsewhere in the world? The answer is market distortions in the form of free water, free electricity and minimum support prices that make it profitable for farmers in many parts of India to cultivate rice.

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The Economic Times, 8 January, 2018, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/agriculture/view-the-culture-of-freebies-must-give-way-to-the-use-of-technologies-in-farm/articleshow/62405641.cm


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