At a time when agriculture growth is projected at 5 per cent for 2010-11 based on predictions of a normal monsoon, Planning Commission member Abhijit Sen says that “unless the sector delivers incomes to farmers, the growth will not be inclusive.”
“We have to plan differently from the Green Revolution Days, when the single-point agenda was to grow more food. [Now] first, agriculture must deliver food, [but] more than that, incomes or agriculture growth will not be inclusive.
“Owing to the gap between creation and dissemination of knowledge, agriculture output has not converted into income for farmers. The distance is worrying since this sector remains critical to the well-being of India,” he said while delivering the B.P. Pal memorial lecture at the Indian Agriculture Research Institute (IARI) here on Thursday.
“After the initial spurt of the Green Revolution, there have been several interventions, but agriculture science has not done that well,” Dr. Sen told an august gathering of farm scientists, including IARI director H.S. Gupta and Agriculture Services Recruitment Board chairman C.D. Mayee who stood in for economist and former Union Minister Y.K. Alagh.
“There are many achievements that the Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) can be proud of, yet things don't add up. The Green Revolution achieved the single-point programme of enhancing cereal output, but too many producers remained poor and illiterate when education was a general failure in the country. The agriculture sector remained much more devoid of knowledge than any other,” he underscored.
According to him, the real problem that science needed to address was how much income could be given to farmers when the education base continued to be poor. The focus should have been on what resources farmers have, with what knowledge base to produce the largest value with least resources. “The problem is defined at the level of farming system, not crops,” he added.
Highlighting the fact that efficient use of water resources did not get the attention it deserved from farm scientists, he said, water availability shall be the biggest problem in years to come. “The level of depletion of ground water that is happening today in Punjab and elsewhere cannot continue.”
Pointing to the scarcity of natural resources and slowing down of productivity, he said it was necessary to increase investment in research. At the same time, if it were to be measured how much research contributed to incremental growth in “technical production,” then he was not optimistic.
Dr. Sen said public expenditure on agriculture was lower in 2003-04 than in the 1980s, but had now doubled in real terms. Yet, growth in the output and income of farmers was not commensurate with what was being spent.
Look for solutions
To make sure that States — the fundamental units in agriculture — spent more on agriculture and that the yield gap was bridged in location-specific manner, the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojna had been conceived. However, the agriculture plans that came from the more than 600 districts under the scheme were not designed in a problem-solving mode. “Can the ICAR look at farm problems in a manner which is solution-oriented and not based on land? We need that kind of vision of the future”
