I will not go so far as to say that if there is food on your plate today, you have to thank them for it. But it will be no exaggeration still if I said that 1 billion or most of them have food in their bellies and if India is food surplus and grain exporting country, we have to thank our farmers for it who are actual responsible for the green revolution.
Agriculture was a backbone of livelihood, security of jobs, income for 70% of our population and also the very basis of our national sovereignty, the multidimensional nature of agriculture has not yet sunk because we were living in call ship to mouth existence in the past. Ship to mouth was in the 60’s, when food came by the ship, infact we waited for wheat to come from Mexico. Our entire grain godowns were near the ports, not in the heartland of agriculture.
But then after we became self-sufficient in food, could it be that we became complacent, in past 10 years about agriculture? Yes, to some extent there is complacency because of large grain stocks, so government felt that there is enough and people started talking about self-sufficiency; also said that India has become grain exporting country. But I think the whole context of larger role of agriculture with nearly 40% of rural people having no land at all, that it has to provide also with jobs, with income, that was forgotten.
Some of the feeling is that its industry that creates job, not agriculture. Industry is now really leading to jobless growth but job led growth can only come from agriculture. In modern industries good industrialists measures the progress by growth in agriculture. It is true that all industries are linked to agriculture, that’s what the Chinese did, they started there reforms in agriculture and not in industry.
All over farmers have three major problems, one is credit, the other is water, third is market, and these are really the three pillars of agriculture. Firstly we need credit for the poor man to buy goods so that he can buy seeds etc. for his farm. Secondly we need to have water, without water nothing can be done and thirdly we must have market for the produce, some produce they will keep for their own consumption the rest of it will have to go for cash income from the market.
I do believe we would make much smoother transition out of farming in the long term in which farmers can make their choices rather than be pushed by distress.
