Thankfully, India is today self-sufficient in food-grain production though a wide gap still exists between availability on the one hand, and distribution and pricing on the other. Much as the farming community justifiably argues that agriculture has become less and less attractive as an investment proposal in terms of the risks and costs involved, an increasing section of the Indian population has been finding it even harder to get one square-meal a day. That is also a measure of prosperity, and not necessarily poverty, full 50 years after Independence and planned development.
At least a part of the blame has to be taken by planning, or lack of it, for distribution and pricing. Through last year, and earlier this year, the Supreme Court had vigorously pursued the case of people living 'Below the Poverty Line' (BPL), directing State Governments to provide their numbers and also evolve schemes for feeding them at low-cost. That the Government at the Centre and in the States should have waited until the higher judiciary was agitated enough to undertake what's primarily a basic executive job should have agitated them, enough.
The fact also remains that the Supreme Court's direction came at a time when starvation-deaths came to be reported from Orissa, once again. Now, a year and more later, after the disturbing sight of starvation-deaths spreading to Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere, reportedly claiming close to 4000 lives in around four years, nothing much is heard of the Supreme Court case, or its agitated mind. The polity had moved from poverty to the poll-mood without anyone knowing it.
There is no denying the fact that agriculture has been becoming increasingly un-remunerative for the farmer. For one thing, irrigation sources have been increasingly difficult to identify and access, particularly after the State moved away from planning in a big way for irrigation. Today, when the reforms-minded opinion-makers and decision-makers have been increasingly talking about improving the infrastructure facilities in terms of better roads and ports, to help all sections of the industry, including agriculture, the basic infrastructural needs of the farm sector, namely, irrigation, has mostly been ignored. None would deny the fact that irrigation projects are extremely capital-intensive, yet, over the decades, individual farmers have been left to fend for themselves increasingly.
Rather than becoming an exception in years of poor rainfall, bore-wells, often paid for by the farmers themselves, have become a regular source of irrigation for segments of farmers, either to cultivate lands once irrigated exclusively from the waters of State-built reservoirs, or to extend the area under cultivation. This has added to the pressures on the system, particularly after recharge of lost groundwater has become problematic for various reasons. The problems of inter-State water-sharing have their origins in these two aspects, and none but the State could find lasting and meaningful solutions. Whether enforced or otherwise, various proposals on water-sharing in individual basin would have no meaning over the coming decades unless the availability of water itself is increased.
The temptation would be to dismiss inter-State river water disputes as political, and cite the differences between Punjab and Haryana on the one hand, and between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, on the other, as irrefutable instances. Considering that differences have presented themselves between neighbourhood populations in and around a water-starved metropolis like Chennai, the non-political nature of the problem would begin standing out. There is a larger population requiring food and water, whose availability has not matched with the growth of the former. If anything, there is stagnation in recent decades once the initial momentum provided by the forgotten Five-Year Plan was lost.
There is great resistance and a mindset against thinking and treating agriculture as an industry. This mindset has only worsened in the reforms era, when even the small-scale sector seized to be considered as 'industry' for easier availability for credit and subsidies. There is no denying the fact that public sector credit made available to the small-scale sector and the farm sector became unrecoverable after a time, particularly considering the cost of recovery. That such a tendency had not restrained any from extending large volumes of public sector credit to the large-scale industry should speak somewhat.
Similar has been the approach to farm sector subsidies, like those on fertilizer and insecticides. While doing away with subsidies makes for meaningful economic policy, as often argued by pro-reforms enthusiasts, their failure to open their eyes to the heightened WTO debate on farm sector subsidies in developed nations is but a sign of an evolving disconnect in policy-planning in the country. That disconnect continues to be ignored.
It is not only the industry sector, at present represented by IT that has had the potential for large-scale exports. The agriculture sector may have greater export-potential, particularly considering the fact that India continues to be a rural, agrarian economy, and unlike the rest, it also addresses one of the basic needs of humanity, for which there is no substitute. The need for focusing on agriculture is even more as urbanization over the past decades has not helped matters beyond a point.
The efforts should be to take urbanization as a concept to rural India, and not the other way round. Increasing unemployment in the rural areas caused by a growing population and stagnating farm-sector activity, has driven people to urban centers. In turn, the latter do not have the support systems to either provide with them jobs, or take care of them, otherwise. At the end of a very long day, they would have added to the unending tally of urban squatters requiring greater and unproductive subsidy from the State in one form or the other - which cannot be denied them after a point.
A change will be possible only if the State revisits the farm sector with an idea of understanding its current status and helps it become a 'growth centre'. If investment-intensive irrigation is what is required, well thought-out hydro-power projects could also meet the electricity requirements of the farm sector and the rest. If availability of water, now based mostly on rains that often play truant, is the problem, then it is the bounden duty of the State to find alternative sources, not only of irrigation but also of a basic input called water, which is also an integral input for determining life and life-styles.
If in the process, desalination became the only way out, as it looks like, then the State alone could take the initiative. Be it conceptualization or education, the Governments at the Centre and in the State would have a lot to do - and much of it, only they can do. Maybe the Governments are not to blame wholly, yet past tax-incentives to the private sector for R&D efforts did not seem to have inspired the latter focus on farm sector research, or in making desalination cheaper. As was the case with captive power-plants in industrial units in an earlier era, captive desalination-plants along the coastal belt could be considered for tax-incentives of the kind from now on.
The larger idea is to accept that new sources of water needs to be found, and also to treat water-intensive agriculture sector as an 'industry' capable of improving the nation's economy and individual living-standards - and at the same time, requiring constant and continuous indulgence from the State, here as elsewhere, and now as ever.
* Views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Observer Research Foundation.
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