What You Need to Know About Agriculture as a Sector of India’s Economy
By: Ekalavya Chaudhuri
Tags: Development, Politics, Agriculture, Economics, India

More to the question than meets the eye?

Probably no one would argue that there is optimal efficiency in India’s agricultural sector. However, one wonders if it is not a fact that the inefficiency here is not a bad inefficiency as it were but a good inefficiency, contradiction though that might seem in terms: something beneficial serving an important purpose.

One is wondering here if it is not a fact being missed out that the agricultural sector in India in giving scope to so many workers than are strictly speaking ‘needed’, provides an enormous net for social security. It affords a potentiality for a life and a livelihood to be kept up for people in times of great catastrophic events causing shocks to a country’s economy where if the country has opted for a market-oriented plan for growth, such shocks can cause severe problems for a chunk of the country’s people.

The people being spoken of here are individuals who don’t have savings per se that they can rely on in the event of a ‘shock’ of the nature described. To take an instance, the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus was a catastrophic event, the lockdown instituted as a policy in response to it by the government of India caused a shock to the economy. The factor or variable in this equation that made livelihoods continue to exist for the many migrant wage-a-day workers who took the long walks back was the agricultural sector that took them in again and gave them opportunities.

In the Philippines one can see the kind of destitute, poverty-stricken squatter ‘camps’ that are a feature due to the large-scale farming that is a key element of the country. Again, in the region of southern Africa, there is a practice of large scale commercial agriculture with power solely with large farm/plantation owners that operates in a way such that there isn’t any safety net. Due to the ensuing rampant joblessness for a great many, there are enormous rates of looting and mugging in the cities of the region.

Commercialization will inevitably mean that there need to be larger farms because any large scale conglomerate will only want to deal with such for ensuring optimal efficiency of costs. It is a fact that in India’s milk sector, farmers have formulated organizations for the purpose of collective bargaining and these serve as base points of collection for corporates. However, it is unlikely that the model could be replicated at scale in such a vast and diverse area as agriculture. Rather, what looks likely is that as farms require to increase their sizes, there will not be space for a great many of those for whom agriculture still as of now acted as a security net.

There is a problem here. Probably, there is not scope for an argument against commercialization in the agricultural space to be made as such if the problems of inefficiency need to be corrected for India’s economy. If growth needs to be there, a transition of some such nature is ultimately inevitable. However, a practical plan in terms of policy for this vision arguably definitely necessitates putting in place some kind of alternative security net mechanism that is at a scale commensurate to what exists at this point. Without this, the factor of alternative non-agricultural employment demand will be a sudden variable introduced into the equation that may be ferocious to such an extent that it is a beast the economy will balk at being able to tame.