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Abstract
The process of planned economic development in India began with the launching of First Five Year Plan in April 1951. At that time, the country was faced with severe food shortage and mounting inflation. The plan accorded pride of place to programmes for agriculture and community development. This was a natural priority for the plan which sought to raise the standard of living in rural areas and also to overcome food shortages. Successive Five year Plans have aimed at improving irrigation facilities, encouraging the use of fertilisers, improved varieties of seeds, implements and machinery and institutional credit. As a result, there has been a significant increase in the use of modern inputs leading to higher productivity and production. Satisfactory progress has been made not only in the production of major foodgrains but also in horticultural crops.
Agricultural sector occupies a key position in the Indian economy. It provides employment to about 65 per cent of the working population of India. Around one-quarter of India's national income originates from this sector. Agricultural products like cereals (mainly rice), tea, coffee, cashew, spices, tobacco and leather are important items of India's exports and hence foreign exchange earnings.
This project will show the developments in Indian agriculture during the post-independence period, explains the key reform measures undertaken for the development of agriculture in the wake of economic liberalisation and examines current issues pertaining to this vital sector of the Indian agribusiness.
Introduction
Indian Agriculture Sector
‘India’s agricultural policy must be ‘grain-centric’, like that of China, which does not allow shrinkage of the cultivable area under food-grains’.
The spectacular story of Indian agriculture is known throughout the world for its multi-functional success in generating employment, livelihood, and food, nutritional and ecological security. Agriculture and allied activities contribute about 30% to the gross domestic product of India.
With arable land area at 168 million hectares, India ranks second only to the U.S. in size of agriculture. A well-developed agricultural research system, a significant area of almost 60 million hectares under irrigation and an increasing productivity in major crops enable Indian agriculture to become a globally competitive player. The United Nations estimates that with assured irrigation, India's food grains output can increase SIX times within five years- enough to feed two planet Earths.
Achievements of Indian Agriculture:
 India is the largest producer of wheat in the world
 India is the largest producer of Rice in the world
 India is among the largest vegetable oil economies in the world
 India is the largest producer of Tea in the world
 India is the second largest producer of Fruits in the world
 India is the largest producer of Milk in the world
 India is the largest producer of Coffee in the world
 India is the largest producer of Cotton in the world
Indian Agriculture by its sheer size and quantum of the activity can dictate global markets directly and indirectly. Majority of rural population still depend on agriculture for their livelihood and over 700 million farmers involved agriculture related activities.
India has 52% of cultivable land and varied climates. With sunshine round the year, it’s the world’s best country to grow crops round the year. Due to Urbanization and rapid growth in the metropolis there is increased demand in the food supply. Too many layers of middlemen, weak supply chain, lack of proper information to the farmers, are some of the factors leadings to wastage and inefficiencies in food supply chain and gives opportunity to improve by using IT and collaborations though “Farm to Fork Strategy”.
Vision of Indian Agriculture:
Taking latest technology to Door Steps of Indian Farmers and making Indian Agriculture as highly viable economic activity in the global environment.
Mission of Indian Agriculture:
Improving the farm productivity and minimizing the supply chain wastage by using globally available best technologies such as biotech, precision farming & innovative organic farming practices & IT tools.
Quality Mission:
Adopting global quality standards to meet global customer needs by creating awareness about end customer requirements among all stake holders in the entire food supply chain.
India has by now had the benefit of half a century of planning on the farm front. One important way of assessing a country’s true independence is to critically examine how independent it is in terms of food security. After all, no country can be termed truly independent if its food requirements are met even partly by imports, like India. More so, when politicians and the farm fraternity have been claiming for almost two decades now, that India, indeed, is “self-sufficient” in food.
Pre-Independence phase:
There has been a wrong notion that the Bengal famine was caused due to food shortage per se. A critical scrutiny of the facts reveal that Indians died in thousands not because of shortage of food, but because, first, much of what was produced in the country was carted off to meet the War efforts of the Imperial masters; and second, the failure to deliver food on time where it was most needed due to inefficient transport system.
It has been a myth that has been propagated for long that this was the prime reason to seek foreign “aid” — the Public Loan (PL) 480 programme of the US in food — and a subsequent justification to turn to the US to guide India’s agricultural destiny. There is another myth — more than 5.5 million tonnes of foodgrains, primarily wheat, were “exported” during the NDA regime at very low prices, causing severe loss to the exchequer, on the pretext that India was surplus in food, while in reality millions of Indians were starving.
Industrial agriculture:
It was in the late 1950s and early 1960s that industrial agriculture, also called the ‘Green Revolution’, was launched on Indian soil. The main feature of this industrial agriculture was “high-input technology” — primarily chemical fertilizers and pesticides — coupled with copious irrigation water.
The International Centre for Maize and Wheat Research in Mexico was experimenting with dwarf wheat which needed heavy doses of chemical fertilizers. The American factories, which were manufacturing lethal chemicals as a War effort to support the Allies (the UK and France), were converted to produce chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and Washington was in desperate need of finding a market for these products.
India was a vast market, and it had no fertilizer plants of its own. The dwarf wheat was brought into India, the seeds multiplied and undivided Punjab chosen as the ‘cradle’ for this industrial agriculture, because the State already had plenty of water. The virgin soils of Punjab initially responded with huge yields, but by the mid-1970s, yields began to plateau, rampant diseases such as the rust erupted like wild-fire, and with them the spread of the deadly Parthenium weed — imported along with the contaminated wheat.
A similar situation was unfolding with rice. The Ford Foundation took the lead in establishing the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Manila, Philippines, and the Washington-controlled Consultative Group for International Research in Agriculture backed the project. Following Richard Nixon’s dictum to use food as a weapon, the game-plan for India was to seize, either through covert administrative and/or political pressure or through monetary lure, the vast and varied (more than 25,000) rare rice germplasm under the control of the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack, Orissa. This game-plan was scuttled by Dr Riccharia, who was then the Director of the Institute.
Technology ‘fatigue’:
By the late 1970s, the once-fertile soils of Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh were beginning to show fatigue — soil degradation, ground-water pollution with excessive chemicals, aquifers drying up and vanishing bio-diversity due to the continuous rice-wheat monoculture. Farmers were beginning to question the advisability of chemical agriculture, and organic farming started to catch on. But many protagonists of the Green Revolution wanted an ‘Evergreen Revolution’ and in came the genetically modified crops.
Once again, the inspiration was from the US. A private MNC engaged in global agribusiness introduced the Bt cotton for an unheard of price of Rs 1,950 for a 450-gm packet, while the native hybrid cost just Rs 350. In Vidarbha district of Maharashtra, the ‘cotton bowl’ of India, thousands of farmers committed suicide when the crop failed, their investments in seed and fertilizers not matching the cotton price, which is a monopoly control.
During the Tenth Plan period, agricultural growth was just 1.78 per cent, while the target was 4 per cent. In 2001, New Delhi dismantled the quantitative restrictions on more than 2,000 items, of which the majority were agricultural products. Pricey American and Australian apples filled up the shelves of classy departmental stores in the metros, while cheap Vietnam pepper and Guatemalan cardamom edged out the once-famous Malabar pepper and Wynad cardamom.
The once-prosperous Malabar and Wynad regions saw thousands of farmers committing suicide, and the State could do nothing to stop the Washington-inspired liberalization policies. New Delhi’s focus shifted from the primary agriculture sector to the services sector, primarily the IT sector. Cheap farm credit was unavailable, and small and marginal farmers felt throttled. Extension services were in a shambles.