Does Farming Have a Future in India?

 A Discussion of 'State of Rural and Agrarian India Report 2020' by
Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies

Sailen Routray

Stamp on Farming Issued by Department of Post and Telegraph in 1982
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

For the first time in a long while, if not ever, the rural is not coterminous with the agrarian. The 2011 Census of India revealed that only 48 percent of the rural population of the country depended upon agriculture as a source of livelihood. But according to the same source of data, 26.3 crores of Indians still work as agricultural workers, a category that includes both cultivators and agricultural labourers. According to the Doubling Farmers’ Income Report, 52% of all agricultural householders in India are under debt and the average size of this debt is 47, 000 rupees.

This is not surprising, as 86% of all land holdings are less than 2 hectares and the
income of farm households that cultivate with these small and marginal holdings are less than the expenditure on household consumption. Wages in rural areas continue to remain depressed apart from very small pockets and unemployment is high, reaching 23% in April-May 2020.

Data released by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reveals that in the quarter century between 1995 and 2019, 14588 agriculturists died every year on an average, because of suicides. This is a total of 3,64,692 suicides by agriculturists in this 25-year period. But given the ways in which data is collected, this is a gross underestimation.

This agrarian crisis affects dalit, adivasi, women-headed and artisanal households in a far more intense manner. How have we come to such a pass as country and a civilization where the community whose work is central to the process of feeding it, stands marginalized and devalued to the extent that such a large number of its member consider ending their lives an honourable and rational option?

The various aspects of a possible answer to this question are known for some time now. In the dominant model of development within which policies related to agriculture and rural areas have been framed, the transition to an urban-industrial economy is perceived to be inevitable. This model has an extractive approach to agriculture where the goal of policy become to ensure the maximisation of a very narrowly defined productivity.

Over the last five to six decades, in the name of increasing yields, monocultures of certain favoured crops such as wheat, sugarcane and rice have been promoted aggressively through the green revolution model that is dependent on hybrid seeds, chemical inputs and assured irrigation. The monoculture in the fields has been accompanied by a monoculture of the minds, especially in the governmental agricultural support system, where the process of knowledge production is centralized in the ICAR institutions and the knowledge of farmers is systematically devalued.

This has had devastating effects on the health of the land and of its people. More than 12 crore hectares of land in India is degraded now. The soil of much of our agricultural land shows less than adequate microbial activity, is deficient in organic matter and has low moisture retention capacity. The promotion of monocultures has also been accompanied by depleting groundwater aquifers, increasing incidence of pest attacks and resultant crop losses, loss of agricultural biodiversity, pollution of water bodies, and deforestation and diversion of commons. 

Climate change that is a result of the dominant development paradigm, is worsening the existing challenges in Indian agriculture. The chemicalization of agriculture has led to increasing prevalence of cancer amongst agriculturists and enhanced concentrations of harmful chemical residues in our food.

The green revolution technologies favoured those regions of the country that were well-endowed with resources and within these focused on farmers of upper/dominant castes belonging to savarna and OBC backgrounds. The public investments in green revolution enhanced the power and status of these communities, increased inequality, and distorted the cropping pattern resulting in a poor diet for most rural folk, in addition to the ecological disasters already mentioned.

The response to the social and ecological crisis in agriculture has been one of populist measures wherein individual farmers are targeted by governments with loan moratoriums, subvention of interests on loans, insurance, income support and increasing the Minimum Support Price (MSP). In the name of reforming agricultural markets, the recent change in laws governing these do very little to introduce accountability to the mandis. By bypassing the local mandis, these changes make the farming communities open to exploitation by large corporations.

Over the last thirty years, there is an increasing concentration of corporation control in the agricultural input market. The recent legal changes will extend this to marketing of agricultural produce as well. The framework of intellectual property within which purported agricultural innovations happen these days marginalise farmers’ knowledge and experimentation. This commoditization of knowledge has been accompanied by financialization of natural resources, and digitalization of practices related to farming. All these processes work in tandem to make farmers vulnerable to adverse manipulations by the corporate system.

Given such a dystopic state of affairs, what is the way forward to effect positive change in India’s agriculture and in the country’s villages? The NRAS report envisages a future where policies affecting rural and agrarian sectors are re-imagined with social justice and environmental sustainability at the center. This will also mean taking climate change seriously. The report then goes on to propose that building circular economies, creating and administering new indicators for measuring success, fostering meaningful livelihoods in villages, and decentralising policy making might be some of the ways in which we can move forward.

A big part of such a transformation has to be cultural and ideological. Instead of valorising sameness we have to start promoting variability. Instead of bowing down to the centrally produced knowledge of the experts, we need to start learning from local experimentation and knowledge systems. The valuing of ecological services, reestablishment of the links between nature and farming, and challenging the centralization of administration, commoditization of knowledge and corporatization of agriculture, have to become part of the new imaginary of the rural and the agrarian.

Such a reorientation of values has to be accompanied by struggles on the ground for making the socio-economic basis of farming and rural life sustainable. Such a vision of practice has to involve fighting for living wages of rural labourers, building local economies around the crafting of objects of everyday use by artisans, use of appropriate technology to reduce unnecessary and avoidable drudgery, and making pastoralists and their animals a necessary and important part of our vision for the rural. 

The economic basis of rural life can be enhanced only if production and marketing strategies are recalibrated to meet local demand so that food and other basic materials are locally produced, stored and distributed. A reformed mandi system is an important part of this process, so are restoring the rights of adivasi communities over land and other resources.

The report under review, thus, correctly diagnoses what is plaguing our agriculture and rural areas and suggests some key ways in which social action can be mounted to change things. The first step in this direction is a process of reimagining development and well-being that keeps the rural, the agrarian, and the life experiences of women and dalit-bahujans at the center.

Agriculturists and other villagers have to then collectively moblise towards the attainment of these goals. City-folk will also need to reorient themselves and their patterns of consumption so that the relationship of exploitation that exists between the rural and the urban can be changed. Most importantly, we have to rethink and reimagine our rural areas as contemporary and future sanctuaries, where fugitives from totalitarian industrial dystopias find refuge not only for their bodies, but for their minds and souls as well.

American farming and stock raising,
with useful facts for the household,
devoted to farming in all its departments (1890s)
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

 

Details About the Document: Richa Kumar, Nikhit Kumar Agrawal, P.S. Vijayshankar, and A.R. Vasavi. 2020. State of Rural and Agrarian India Report 2020: Rethinking Productivity and Populism Through Alternative Approaches. Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies.