An appeal has been made to take proactive measures so as to attract youngsters towards agriculture and to make green collar jobs viable, sustainable and interesting for youth.
K. Vairavan, Dean, Agricultural College and Research Institute, Madurai, has come out with a multi-pronged strategy after studying crucial issues such as price policy, productivity, wages for agriculture workers, farm mechanisation, prevention of land conversion and agrarian crisis, natural resources, migration and teaching agriculture in schools/colleges.
A set of suggestions has been given for making agriculture more profitable and also to reduce the earning disparity between white collar jobs and farming so that youngsters will reject IT jobs and other professions to choose agriculture as their career.
In a detailed report on ‘youth in agriculture' released on February 25, he said that parents and teachers have an important role to play in developing this interest. “Everybody wants their sons and daughters to be a dollar-earner or white collar job seeker. If that is the case, how is it possible to sustain agriculture?” he asked.
To narrow down the income disparity between engineering jobs and agriculture income, Dr. Vairavan suggested a few measures.
Price policy
There is an unfavourable input-output price relation in agricultural produce. The first and foremost is to fix profitable price and the Government should take bold decision in fixing minimum support price. “Present level of support price for paddy and wheat is not profitable to farmers. It should be substantially enhanced and by this we can increase the farmers' income as well as attract youth to agriculture,” the ACRI Dean has mooted.
Increase productivity
He said that agricultural productivity has to be increased with the help of scientific intervention. “By using the normal systems, we have reached 10 tonnes per hectare in rice, 250 tonnes per hectare in sugarcane and 100 tonnes per hectare in vegetables through SRI in rice, drip irrigation (sugarcane) and precision farming in vegetables. This is very low,” he observed.
Dr.Vairavan has welcomed some of the recent moves of Tamil Nadu Government to develop infrastructure required for agriculture such as road facilities, cold storage, threshing floors, agro industries in rural areas and 100 per cent subsidy for precision farming/drip irrigation besides 50-75 per cent subsidy for farm implements and tractors with the aim of doubling the yield and increasing the farmers' income.
Prevent land conversion
He made a plea that the law pertaining to conversion of agricultural land should be modified. “Land kept as fallow for more than three years should be brought under social or corporate farming and should not be used for non-agricultural purposes,” he said. To prevent agrarian crisis, migration of rural people to urban areas has to be stopped and that will be possible only if adequate facilities such as rural banking, approachable roads, quality education in rural schools, agro industries and hospitals are provided.
The Dean also said that all rivers should be declared as national assets and interlinked. By doing so, the crop failures and losses from agriculture can be eliminated and farming activity becomes profitable. Need for higher wages for agricultural workers was also pointed out in the report.
He expressed concern that government servants, politicians, scientists and even the farmers are not willing to send their wards to take up agriculture as a profession. Every year, around 40 lakh students are passing Plus Two exams in India and hardly 2,000 students step in to agricultural colleges each year.
“My appeal is that we have to teach agriculture oriented courses also in our schools and colleges and the younger generation has to develop interest in farming,” Dr. Vairavan said. He can be reached on his e-mail ID: >vairavan1954@hotmail.com .
