| When India's population was 350 million decades ago, 75 per cent of the people eked out a living by farming. But at today's 1.1 billion, the percentage of people living on land is still 60 per cent. “Land is a shrinking resource all over the country and you have no option but to produce from less land and less water”, says eminent agricultural scientist Dr M. S. Swaminathan. The octogenarian Rajya Sabha MP laments that “we have widespread malnutrition because small and marginal farmers are malnourished”. |
In an interview to Business Line, Dr Swaminathan asserted that “India will remain a predominantly agricultural country. Shaping, instead of predicting, the future of agriculture is the duty of farm scientists, just as we shaped the future of agriculture in the 1960s through the Green Revolution. Modern industry offers jobless growth but agriculture accords a job-led growth. What CII and others should understand is that the largest private industry in India is agriculture — crop husbandry, animal husbandry, fishery, forestry, horticulture and agro-processing.”
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| At the height of the Green Revolution, the media was “ecstatic” about the dwarf wheat varieties making waves in the country, but today unfortunately the attention is on farm debt and farmer suicides. |
Edited excerpts from the interview:
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Why is the farm sector in the doldrums despite proactive measures from the Government?
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The National Commission on Farmers has examined in great detail the fatigue issue in Green Revolution — the stagnation in yield, and the fall in factor productivity in relation to the 1960s. You need to double the quantity of fertiliser to produce the same output. Some of the reasons for the stagnancy are decline in investment in rural areas from the 1990s, and overexploitation of natural resources in States such as Punjab and Haryana.
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We divided the country into four areas. First, the Green Revolution (GR) areas — the heartland of GR Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh.
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Second, the green, but no GR, areas — the whole of Eastern India, including West Bengal and Assam, where water is not really the limiting factor.
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| Third, un-irrigated areas — with almost 60 per cent rain-fed, and only 40 per cent irrigated in spite of the best efforts. Even here, I would say only 30 per cent has got fairly reasonable irrigation. Groundwater is the most important component here. |
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The rain-fed areas produce pulses, oilseeds and many horticultural plants. Stagnancy in pulses production is because they are produced in un-irrigated areas. Fourth, special zones like the hills — the Himalayas, Western Ghats/Eastern Ghats — and coastal areas.
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| The most important suggestion we made was conservation and climate-resilient farming. In the US Farm Bill, for instance, the largest amount of money goes to conservation farming — soil conservation and conservation of bio-diversity. We have added climate-resilient farming and you have to have a new technology that helps minimise loss through changes in temperature. |
We recommended shifting the breeding strategy to per day productivity and not per crop. Wheat yield in Punjab, farmers say, is a gamble in temperature and not rainfall.
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Treating the saline soil is crucial. The Central Soil Salinity Institute in Karnal has developed a lot of technologies for reclamation of saline soil.
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So, we must restore our soil fertility, conserve our groundwater, promote more use of river water with groundwater and adopt technologies which are climate-resilient. We can develop wheat varieties which are less temperature-sensitive.
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In the green but no GR areas (Eastern India) there is going to be a second GR.
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| Sadly, today, 40 per cent of the farmers want to quit farming as revealed by the NSSO, and how do you have a second GR? But in the green but no GR areas there is a large untapped production reservoir. They can double the production over a period of time through water management, rainwater harvesting and care of soil health. That every farmer should be given a soil healthcare card is what we recommended, and the only State which did so quickly was Gujarat |
| The plant is no magician, it requires inputs for output. But nitrogen alone will not do. Micronutrients are needed to assuage what we call hidden hunger of the soil. |
| In the summer heat, carbon goes away, leaving soil carbon conditions poor. You may give any amount of nitrogen and if the micronutrient iron is not there, you will not get full yield. |
| So balanced fertiliser use is very important and that is why we recommended a nutrient-based subsidy which was accepted by the Government, and was implemented from April 1. I have not yet studied how well it is doing as it requires a lot of preparation on the part of farmers, such as determining deficiency in the soil. |
| In balanced farming we need to look at soil, water, credit and insurance. |
| Credit-linked insurance is weak. Farming is the riskiest profession. Higher the risk, the greater the insurance. Farming is the largest, most unsecured enterprise in the world. We have not insulated the farmers. We have forsaken the farmer to nature. |
| What do you think ought to be done to bring farming back into focus and what strategies are needed to stimulate farming as an industry? |
| We need to seriously look at agriculture. There are 128 agro-climatic zones in the country. We need in each and every zone a contingency plan, alternative cropping strategy, seed banks, grain banks and modern grain silos. For instance, in the seed bank in Koraput (Orissa), the women used to maintain 20-30 varieties of paddy seeds — one for late sowing, one for crop failure and a rescue crop. But now we have made it all homogenous in the bank. |
| There must be technological upgrading of agriculture through use of information technology sponsored by the Department of Information Technology in establishing common service centres (CSC) across the country.B L 210710 |
| krsr/and/133/210710 |
