NRAS
Excerpts
This report is an attempt to provide a comprehensive and critical overview of the state of contemporary rural India. It focuses on the key structural factors, especially policies and trends, that have marked rural India’s economic and ecological conditions. Through this report we wish to share alternative ideas, paradigms and methodologies to address these entrenched problems and challenges. We hope the range of stakeholders—farmers, rural citizens, elected representatives, gram panchayat members, policy-makers, academics, students and interested members of the public, including farmer organisations and civil society networks, will engage with the ideas and suggestions. There is an urgent need to address the extant erasure of rural livelihoods, depletion of natural resources and the pauperization of rural citizens, which misplaced policies and outdated ideas continue to perpetuate. The key questions and the following responses in this report seek to provide some pathways towards new alternatives
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1. Introduction
Concerns over the state of rural India have grown to become a litmus test for the nation’s policies and political strategies. Even before COVID-19, the rural economy was facing severe distress. The heart-rending sight of migrant workers walking back home after the COVID-19 outbreak and the national lockdown, has opened up the nation’s conscience to the vast humanitarian crisis. There is a real need for a substantive engagement with rural India. Yet, the diversity of voices and views indicate no clarity on future directions. Building upon ten years of engagement with rural an and agrarian India, the NRAS Collective is bringing out this report which has two parts.
In the first part, we outline the current dominant policies and paradigms and their implications for rural residents, livelihoods, ecologies and geographies. In the second part, we present alternative ideas, methodologies, and approaches to facilitate the implementation of policies which are socially just, economically stable, ecologically sustainable and politically democratic for rural India.
The 1960s marked a significant shift in India’s agricultural strategy towards a high productivity regime with its exclusive focus on a few crops in the irrigated tracts of the country. Though this has resulted in an acceleration of agricultural growth and higher food production, monocultures of these crops have meant loss of agro-ecological diversity and practices associated with each diverse agrarian region. Crops like millets and pulses have been the least favoured, and dryland regions have received little attention. This model of high input industrial agriculture has become the established way of doing agriculture in India. This inherently fragile and high risk model has placed the natural resource base of rural India (land, water and forests) under severe stress. The long term growth path of agriculture is proving to be ecologically unsustainable and socially unjust. Compounding this is the impact of cataclysmic climate change.
These developments in agriculture, which have been reinforced in the past few years by changes in the non-farm sector of the rural economy, have given rise to unprecedented rural distress. It is now known that the non-farm sector is increasingly gaining importance at the household level in rural India, as employment in agriculture is stagnant or declining. Non-farm employment growth has been slow in India in recent years.
Rural distress has several other manifestations like rising numbers of suicides, pervasive under-nutrition among women and children, growing disease burden and rising healthcare costs. The flows of finance, people, resources, technologies and waste are reshaping the rural-urban relationship with serious implications for ecology, health and society.
Rural India is in urgent need of an alternative vision for its sustainability and the well-being of the majority of its people. It is necessary to understand that the rural economy is an integral part of a larger ecosystem. This means reshaping our patterns of production and consumption through an understanding of the framework of co-existence or interdependence.
The economy of rural and agrarian India has been based on extractive relationships with the environment and natural resources (food, fiber, minerals, forest wealth) and policy makers, scientists and industrialists committed to modern industrial agriculture have refused to acknowledge the true value of these resources. The environment has also been converted into a sink to which waste is dumped. We must structurally address this issue and transform these relationships from extraction to co-existence, centred on the perspective of agro-ecology and combine insights from knowledge systems and practices of local communities with insights from the sciences.
This would also require us to challenge the conventional divides between urban and rural, between industry and agriculture and between farm and non-farm. Work has to be ecologically suitable, meaningful and satisfying. Given the crisis of livelihoods we face currently, the problem of the rural cannot be solved by making the rural itself redundant. There is the pressing need to develop technologies and market relationships that can support the work of people in diverse rural livelihoods without replacing them entirely.
Articulating new legal regimes that can safeguard the needs of the marginalised majority to conserve and use natural resources must form the bedrock of new policies. But this would require concerted action and building strong alliances of people–farmers, rural communities, urban communities, civil society actors along with the community of committed scientists, people’s representatives and policymakers. Bringing the voices and experiences of the marginalised majority (the landless, tenant farmers, women farmers, forest-dwellers, fisherfolk, dalits, adivasis, rural artisans, pastoralist groups, among others) into the policy making process would strengthen the foundations of rural India’s pluralism and revitalise its grassroots democratic polity.
Lastly, translating this alternative vision into practice would require abandoning conventional indicators and building new ones. We need to stop valuing growth as measured by the GDP. The new set of measurements take into account ecological sustainability as one of the key indicators of “green” growth. Can we recognise and value farmers for the ecosystem services that they provide, for the agro-biodiversity that they can help conserve, for the healthy food that they can grow? These alternative metrics will help us assess the ecological and social impacts of our activities, understand the positive and negative feedback loops and take informed decisions.
- What Constitutes the Web of Risks in Agriculture?
- An important component of the Green Revolution model of high-input, high productivity agriculture in its initial years was the public-funded farm extension system providing knowledge support to farmers. The success of the Green Revolution firmly established this model in which the national agricultural research system became the source of all agricultural knowledge and the indigenous knowledge systems of the farming communities were completely marginalised.
- Rather than drawing upon the knowledge and vast experience of the farming communities and other stakeholders or building upon local agro-ecological characteristics for choosing cropping patterns, the agricultural science establishment plunged headlong into pushing high yielding crop varieties and inputs in a centralised manner. This process re-configured diverse ecologies and cast them into irrigated landscapes growing few crops.This contributed to the web of [following] risks.
Heavy Centralization of Agricultural Science and Technology Research
- It included both, a centralization of setting research agendas (irrigation – chemicals – HYVs) and the centralisation and consolidation of research funding (over 80% was allocated to Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) institutes). State Governments and respective State Agricultural Universities were neglected and the meagre funding they received was also tied to research content.
- The complete buy-in of the agricultural science establishment to an already formulated policy goal of improving grain productivity at any cost ruled out all forms of alternatives from being tried out, even at a small scale, within the establishment. The singular achievement of raising food production placed this monoculture, high productivity model more firmly on a pedestal.
- Further, there was no effective dialogue between the natural and social sciences so that robust and holistic scientific research could be done effectively.
- Uniform education and accreditation mechanisms (in a country with explosive agricultural diversity) and universalisation of the hierarchical‘Package of Practices’ system (from the state to farmers), further contributed to devaluing local knowledge and biodiversity.
- For instance, national level standardised systems of evaluating and understanding soils, through programs like the soil health card, are ill-equipped to assess the problem of soils at the micro level of the agro-ecosystem. They fail to look at the soil as a living system. Much of our formal scientific research on soils has also sidestepped the issue of interlinkages between the physical, biological and the chemical, and instead, chosen to focus on narrow singular factors affecting soils..
Knowledge Dissonance and Technological Treadmills
- The scaling down of extension services by the state with liberalisation in the 1990s adversely impacted the flow of information to farmers and increased dissonance in knowledge.
- The poor performance of the state-funded extension and increasing competition among agri-business players led to a situation where these agri-business companies and traders assuming the role of suppliers of both knowledge and inputs to the farmers. The intense rivalry between farmers to out-compete each other has led to the wide use of new commercial varieties of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, which has also led to increasing ‘agricultural deskilling‘.
- Caste, class and gender have shaped access to information and often, only large, male, upper caste farmers have access to the scientific and bureaucratic establishment and its flow of knowledge and inputs. Others are increasingly dependent on input dealers and suppliers who are more inclined to promote products with the highest financial returns as opposed to efficacy in the field.
- All these magnified the web of risks, especially for farmers in dryland areas of the country and for those belonging to underprivileged castes and classes. Agriculturists found themselves unable to provide for their families as they attempted to sustain themselves within this dominant model.
- Along with the technological treadmill, increasing indebtedness, lack of marketing support, and unviable parcels of land made agriculture a losing proposition. This was especially the case for those with inadequate capital, knowledge and support and who considered this to be the only route to enhancing their livelihoods, economic mobility and social status. In such a context of risks (and burdens of debt), loss of production meant that the loss became a deeply personalized loss of self, often leading to suicide.
Hunger, the Green Revolution and GMOs
- The Green Revolution was justified by the argument that India had a serious food production deficit in the 1960s and was importing huge quantities of food from other countries to meet its needs. The image of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 was often invoked to legitimise the promotion of grain productivity programs and capital-technology-chemical inputs into agriculture as ways to prevent famines.
- However, re-examination of the experience of the 1943 Bengal Famine by Amartya Sen has shown that the famine was not due to unavailability of food but due to lack of entitlements of the poor. Enough food was available but people could not afford to purchase it, and hence, went hungry. Moreover, food imports were not due to unavailability of food domestically but due to geopolitical considerations and domestic concerns about moving food from surplus states to deficit states
- It is also to be noted that in the decade that immediately followed independence (1950-60), there was a remarkable recovery in the performance of agriculture. That decade saw the highest increase in productivity across all crops. Even after the adoption of the Green Revolution paradigm, hunger did not disappear, as a large portion of the population could not afford to purchase enough food. Moreover, we lost the diversity of our farms and the nutrition of our plates. Genetically Modified (GM) crops follow the same logic of monoculture farming, replicating the known problems of pest resistance that plagued farmers in the Green Revolution. Further, neither of the two principal GM traits commercialized globally, insect resistance and herbicide tolerance, enhance yields.
- GM crops have been promoted in the name of feeding the growing world population, especially the billions of poor. Research on statistics that have been used to calculate the ‘food’ required to feed a global population of 9 billion in 2050 shows that a far greater proportion of that food is destined to feed the much smaller population of the global north. This is because of the projected sustained growth of meat consumption in the global north that would require far more land, water and energy to produce.
- Unfortunately, world over we are saddled with global and national food systems that leave millions food insecure and generate significant collateral damage in the form of environmental degradation.
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6.2 Lack of Accountability in Agricultural Markets
- The Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Act that set up the public market yard (mandi) infrastructure of the country in the 1970s was created with the intention of curtailing the power of agricultural intermediaries(traders, brokers, processors, etc.). However, over time, the APMC mandis came to be controlled by a handful of trading families in many places, creating oligopolies over finance, trade, processing and transport. Lack of downward accountability, conflicts over quality determination and weighment, and structural constraints faced by farmers (such as interlinked credit and product markets, small lot sizes of varying quality, crashing prices with local oversupply), plagued the marketing process.
- For the majority of small and marginal farmers, transportation costs to the mandi were prohibitive and they sold at the village itself to local traders who paid them less.
- Post-liberalisation in the 1990s, price volatility, growth of agribusinesses, and other factors, led the central and state governments to promote online commodity futures markets, contract farming, direct purchase by corporates from the farmers and private marketplaces, where farmers could sell their produce.
- However, in private market yards, companies set their own rules for purchase (especially regarding quality) and didn’t hold an auction, since they were the sole buyer. Farmers had very little ability to influence the rules or negotiate in the private marketplace, unlike the public mandi space where farmers could collectively demand accountability from officials and had the option to make complaints against traders. Companies were primarily accountable to shareholders, not farmers.
- Recently, the government has passed the ‘The Farmers’ Produce Trade And Commerce (Promotion And Facilitation) Act, 2020’ to effectively bypass the mandi system. However, APMC markets have been an important medium for price discovery at the local level for the farmers and their dismantling will leave farmers with no buyer of last resort. The need has been to reform the mandis and improve their accountability towards farmers, not bypass them altogether.
- For instance, the repeal of the APMC Act in Bihar, back in 2006, neither helped farmers who have been forced to distress sell their produce year after year, well below the MSP, nor has it been able to ensure private investment in the development of market yards.
- Further, participation in online commodity futures markets and negotiable warehouse receipts requires a certain lot size, which is beyond the ability of 90% of farmers in the country. These institutions have been used mostly by traders and agribusinesses rather than farmers.
- Contract farming has also got a boost with the ‘The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020’. However, given the power hierarchy between farmers and big-pocket sponsors, the terms of the contract and the possibility of its enforcement are skewed in favour of the latter. Also, large investments by a few corporates into crops that meet urban and global demand would adversely impact the already skewed crop diversity in the country. This integration into long supply chains would also create transportation emissions, negatively impacting the climate
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–Read full report here:
–Excerpts courtesy: Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies (NRAS)
Author profile: The Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies (NRAS) was established in 2010, motivated by the twin objectives of a) reinvigorating the study of agrarian and rural issues in India’s academic institutions and enabling scholars to engage with a range of pressing issues and ideas; and b) influencing the pedagogy and curriculum of academic institutions to encompass rural and agrarian issues. In 2015, the NRAS initiated a Working Paper series, offering members a chance to share their work with a broader audience before these are published elsewhere. As of today there are 120 members who form part of the network. Also read:
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