Agriculture

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Indian agriculture dates back several millennia with the Vedas providing very detailed description of agricultural practices and processes. Ancient religious and historical records also classify land by its capacity of production: fertile, barren, desert, fallow, grassy, muddy, watery, contiguous to water, full of pebbles and pieces of limestone, sandy, watered from a river, and rainfed. Several staples including rice, wheat, barley, oats; legumes including lentil and chickpeas, edible seeds including sesame, linseed, safflower, mustard, castor, mung bean, black gram, horse gram, pigeon pea, field pea, grass pea, fenugreek; cash crop including cotton, sugarcane; fruits including jujube, grapes, dates, jack fruit, mango, mulberry, black plum have been documented. These were grown for not just domestic consumption but also for processing and export.

Ancient dynasties also built extensive agricultural infrastructure to store rain and river water in tanks and dams; channels to carry water to agricultural fields; canals to allow water-based transport of produce; and docks to facilitate the export of agriculture produce. Many of such infrastructure (documented in stories, epigraphy, foreign visitor travelogues, sculpture, and paintings) are still in use in various parts of India. Sugar was grown mostly in India till about the 18th century. The British transferred this technology and indentured labour to many other parts of the world such as Africa, the Caribbean Islands, and even the Pacific. However, they also systematically dismantled agricultural industries and got farmers to produce goods that they would tax and buy at highly controlled low prices so that they can process them in their own facilities and maximise profit. British records themselves say that such practices manufactured large scale famines in India resulting in the death of millions of people.

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While the sector is performing well, supporting infrastructure such as storage, roads, access to markets, fair financing, and customer access remained a problem for 70 years. However, major agricultural reforms have been initiated after 2014 to bring down many of these issues. With the advent of pervasive Internet, several agriculture aggregation companies have empowered farmers to sell their products directly to end customers. However, bad politics, local corruption, and non-uniform infrastructure at the state level continues to keep millions of farmers below the poverty line. Also, extensive use of chemical fertiliser and pesticides in states like Punjab has increased per hectare yield but also reduced profitability as cost of inputs due to increased usage requirements continue to grow year on year. Sikkim became the first Indian state to become 100% organic in 2016 and there is a silent revolution where wealthy and more aware customers are demanding non-chemical produce.

Because of colonial and historical reasons, land holdings in India are rather small making them non-conducive to economic scaling. Further, archaic British laws also limit the capacity of a farmer to exit or a non-farmer to enter the sector. Post-independence socialist-based Nehruvian policy also limited a farmer’s right to sell outside his state. Top-down Soviet-style policies created many dams resulting in the drying up of rivers, starving local storage tanks, and dis-using agricultural channels, making India a water-starved nation and reduced the Indian farmer to depend on rain for his crops to succeed. Climate change caused by pollution from domestic and international sources have changed wind, rainfall, and weather patterns.