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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | What India’s farm crisis really needs -Christophe Jaffrelot and Hemal Thakker

What India’s farm crisis really needs -Christophe Jaffrelot and Hemal Thakker

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published Published on Mar 16, 2021   modified Modified on Mar 16, 2021

-The Indian Express

To solve India’s deep agrarian crisis, more public investment and government support are needed, not the new farm laws

The farmers’ movement invites us to revisit the trajectory of India’s agriculture so as to understand its real problems. Beginning in the mid-1960s, India and, especially, Punjab experienced a massive productivity boom as a result of widespread adoption of Green Revolution technologies. This transition was driven by public investment in irrigation and market infrastructure. Essential to the system’s success was the minimum support price, which incentivised the cultivation of wheat and rice. Area under paddy cultivation in Punjab jumped from 4.8 per cent of total cropped area in 1960-61 to 39.19 per cent in 2018-19. Similarly, wheat area share increased from 27 per cent to 45 per cent. The production of wheat in Punjab during the Green Revolution period increased by over 7 per cent annually, with yield increases accounting for a little over half of that growth. By contrast, other crops began to decline. In 1960-61, Punjab had a total of 21 crops in the cropping system which fell to nine in 1991. The Green Revolution had other adverse long-term economic and ecological effects. Partly because of water scarcity, growth rates of yield have decreased to 2 per cent per year for wheat; and are stagnant or negative for rice. The wheat-rice cropping monoculture has not only led to depletion of groundwater levels, but also to the excessive use of chemical pesticides, posing a threat to biodiversity.

Secondly, the absence of land reforms has worsened the challenges in rural India. In Punjab and Haryana, the bottom 50 per cent of the smallholders owned 0.47 per cent of the land in 1953-54. The figure increased to 0.52 per cent in 1961-62 but fell to 0.28 per cent by 1971-72 before increasing marginally over the next decade to end at 0.32 per cent by 1982. The number of households in Punjab without land or on sub-marginal land holdings (50.99 acres) has only grown. In the same period, “middle peasants” saw their share of land holdings rise from 22.69 per cent to 34.19 per cent of total land under cultivation. The 10th agriculture census of 2015-16 shows that small and marginal farmers with less than two hectares of land account for 86.2 per cent of all farmers in India but own just 47.3 per cent of the crop area. In comparison, semi-medium and medium land holding farmers (owning between 2-10 hectares of land) account for 13.2 per cent of all farmers, but own 43.6 per cent of crop area.

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The Indian Express, 16 March, 2021, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/farmers-crisis-protest-laws-7229913/


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