Page 163 - DECO502_INDIAN_ECONOMIC_POLICY_ENGLISH

Unit 13: Recent Issues in Indian Agriculture

• Soil fertility is also an area of concern. Maps of India show that only about 11 percent of soils Notes
are high in available nitrogen. Similarly, about 20 percent of soils are high in available phosphorus
and about 50 percent in potassium.
• Indian agriculture is particularly vulnerable to climate change which A. K. Singh, deputy director-
general, natural resource management, of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, believes
could cause yield drops of between 4.5 and 9 percent by 2039. Crop yields may fall by 25 percent
or more by 2099.
• Climate change affects the small and marginal farmers the most because they can least afford
irrigation. Indeed some 80 million hectares (net sown area of around 143 million hectares) is
irrigation-deprived and depends on the errant rains, but more than 85 per cent of the pulses
and coarse cereals, more than 75 percent of the oilseeds and nearly 65 percent of cotton are
produced from land characterized by low yields, usually in semi-arid zones.
• The most inexplicable issue around Indian agriculture is the continued waste of food that has
promoted the Supreme Court to castigate heavily the government. The food ministry has
admitted that foodgrains of USD 6 billion have gone waste in 2010, most of it in state warehouses.
• The APMC Act of most states does not encourage direct marketing and contract farming, and
the prohibitions under the APMC Act do not allow investment by the private sector for improving
the infrastructure.
• It is encouraging to note that marketing reforms are expected to become one of the top priorities
in the 12th five-year plan. The APMC Act has been repelled in Bihar and amended in a further
16 other states.
• The latest Union budget has thus focused on aspects of food preservation, storage and logistics.
Mukherjee has talked of the need to have warehousing and cold chains. On January 1st, 2011,
the food grain stock in the Central pool reached 4.7 million metric tonnes, 2.7 times higher than
1.74 million metric tonnes on January 1st, 2007, and the storage capacity for such large quantities
requires augmentation.
• The larger issues are around the fact that India’s growing population has to be fed, and that
will need some drastic and dramatic changes in the way agriculture is being run. It needs to be
borne in mind that with economic growth, the diet of large segment of India’s population is
changing : there is far greater demand for dairy and meat products, and this is an area that will
demand special attention.
• The answer to these issues lies in science and technology and in research. Merely copying
Western solutions will not suit the Indian need. In any event, unlike in the corporate sector -
where multinationals and their technology could gain easy entry because Indian companies
were at par or nearly at par with them - agriculture is one area where global technologies will
encounter resistance and, in many cases, for good reason.
• There are also opportunities in the dairy and livestock sectors through bio-technology to
strengthen conventional breeding methodology by evolving plant varieties resistant to pest
and diseases, tolerant to adverse weather conditions, with better nutritional value and enhanced
durability. Here too, appropriate PPP models are being examined.
13.5 Key-Words

1. Infrastructure : Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the
operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary
for an economy to function. It can be generally defined as the set of
interconnected structural elements that provide framework supporting an
entire structure of development. It is an important term for judging a country
or region's development.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 157