The image above is not what it looks like at first glance. They are not the brightest spot on the globe, but are the water stressed and starved geographies of the world.

The long and short of the Farmers agitation is against the three bills that were passed without any wider consultations and across the nation the protest is widespread with a deaf and dumb government that is only sensititive to it's cronies and manipulating agendas.

The soul of India is agriculture and people who do not find their existential mooring & dependence in agriculture are either living in self denial or are wilfully ignorant.

All commisions on agricultural pricing made in the past are essentially time lapsed and are redundant in the context of ground realities as government has no intent to put them in actions.

Farming , its practices, its marketing needs a complete new look & some of the way forwards are discussed here.

What no Indian political party is willing to touch the hornet nest of water crisis that agriculture & farming faces, asides from unviable cities that are increasingly concretised.

Nearly 60% of the country faces high to extremely high water stress. The problem is deeply rooted, which hosts 20% of the world’s population for only 4% of the global water resource.

India placed 13 among the world's 17 ‘extremely water-stressed’ countries. Twelve of the 17 are from the Middle East and North Africa region; climate changes are already complicating the crisis.A few bold reforms in farm management would need robust measures. Hard times definitely merits a hard decisions and time for that is now. There should not be any looking back from here.

Subdivision and fragmentation of land is one of the biggest curse of Indian agriculture that obstructs progressive agricultural development in India and has killed Indian farming. But it has a strong rooting to social structure of inheritence resulting in unviable farm sizes for small and marginal farmers.

The consolidation of land in large and compact blocks will permit more land to be brought under cultivation. This, in its turn, will make many types of investment profitable.

Such investments cannot be undertaken on the small and scattered plots by individual small and marginal farmers.

It is possible, for example, to use modern agricultural equipment like pump-sets, tractors, threshers, harvesters etc. only when the area of operation is sufficiently large.

Similarly, irrigation schemes would be useless on fragmented plots because a large quality of irrigation water will bear fruit only when the water can be properly utilised on a large area of land.

The problem of agriculture in India is not fertility or agricultural inputs, but is water crisis and tiny land holdings.

Consolidation through collective farming would modernise agriculture in less than a few years. We can call it Cooperative farming certainly.

Cooperatives have far superior access to markets, finance and input costs. The bargaining power would go up substantially with some statutory interventions.

Indian diary was a showcase project of cooperative movement that started at Anand in Gujarat that now is so politicised that it is on brink of losses. Thanks to local governments in last twenty years that planted their political henchmen and mouthpiece men & women in key positions.

With advent of private cooperatives and milk collection centres, milk is also a loss making business in most part of India today, just like any other grain, vegetables or pulses farming.

In UP, which is the biggest milk producer in the country, people are giving up animal husbandry as a profession due to arm-twisted pricing by private milk processing cooperatives. So is the case now in Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and other places.

The biggest reform that needs to be taken at policy levels (not expected by a government run by selective corporate sponsoring) is fixing the price of the produce by fixing end use price. Value addition cannot mean small and marginal farmers gets poorer by the minute while the companies processing agricultural produce gets wealthier by the hour.

We need to examine a cap in value difference between basic input and basic output, like in rice, flour, vegetables, pulses etc. A rice mill has hardly 15 percent husk and dust, while wheat can be twenty percent maximum for flours and hardly 5% for atta (Indian Chapati flour). Also, in true sense, there is hardly any wastage, rest jusk and broken kernels etc go for animal feeds and solvent extraction oil plants or as energy modules for home and industrial use.

Value additions in primary processing, except for a few items of agricultural inputs, like sugar- tea / coffee, are not more than 30% in most cases.There is no wisdom in selling paddies to middlemen at Rs. 12 a KG, while finished rice is sold in markets at 40 to 60 per KG!!!

Are the processing units so inefficient? Then they must be shut down. Sililar is the story of wheat , legumes and all Rabi & Kharif (Summer & Winter) crops.

So instead of tinkering with Minimum Support Price (MSP) to the farmers, we need to ensure legal frameworks to ensure a model of Maximum Retail Price (MRP) of finished goods based on value addition model plus a reasonable profit for the finishers.

Why not have the Cost Audit mandatory for food processing units?

It automatically insulates the farmers from exploitations across the spectrum of produce and will be the biggest agricultural reform, if done, anywhere in the world.

Any farmer having less than 5 acre must be induced and supported to join cooperative farming and they must collectively share land boundaries without losing any right or privilege on land holdings.

Subsidised input must be made telescopic. For example, a farmer having land holding of more than 10 acres but less than 20 acres may be allowed only 50% of subsidies available on fertilizers, electricity and water cost etc.

Farmers having land holding in excess of 20 acres, but less than 50 acres may be allowed subsidies not beyond 30 to 40% of all inputs on which the subsidy is granted by the government. Fragmented land owning farmers can join cooperative faming to avail the maximum benefits. 

Farmers having land holding in excess of 50 acres may not be given any subsidy at all.

Income Tax, which is an untouchable subject for farmers, now needs a fresh look.

There is absolutely no wisdom in allowing large farmers to go tax free in a country where lower income salaried middle class is not even spared to feed the profligate, corrupt and inefficient governments that we have witnessed recently.

Large farmers must be taxed, not as a percentile of their income, which is difficult to assess, but on a fixed rate based on their land holdings, say at Rs. 2,500 per acre beyond twenty acres and at Rs 3,500 per acre beyond twenty and less than 100 acres.

Farmers having land holdings beyond 100 acres may be taxed at say Rs. 6,000 per acre and not on income earned out of farming. At least , let there be a beginning.

Large famers having acreages, say, beyond twenty acres cannot have the cake and the crumbs too. Instead of sending frivolous IT notices to farmers, make is mandatory to have farm income as income taxable.

This would prevent this government to sell national silvers to private players/ crony capitalists & groups for a song.

India being water starved now in vast swathe of farm lands, the irrigation, given the vagaries of weather, is now mostly through extraction of ground water. There should be a strict regulation in sanctioning such bore-well and it must be punitively charged only for certain depth & not beyond that.

India receives 4,000 billion cubic metres (bcm) of water through rainfall annually. Of this only 1,130 bcm is utilisable and the rest add to the river flows. Of the 1,130 bcm, 690 bcm fills the surface water bodies while another 440 bcm seep into the ground water and only 400 bcm is accessible for extraction.

Crisis Zones: Most of northern Punjab, southern Rajasthan, eastern Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, northern Karnataka, almost entire Rayalaseema, large parts of Tamil Nadu, parts of Madhya Pradesh and southern parts of West Bengal lie among region which is water starved due to reckless exploitations. We can easily see how subsidised electricity for farming and villages have lead to excessive ground level water exploitations. So we also need to look very closely into this.

Against the global average of per capita 7,600 cubic metre annual availability of freshwater, the figure for India is merely 1,545 cubic metres annually as compared to Brazil 41,865; US 9,802; China 2,060 cubic metre annually. In the last 50 years. The per capita water availability has shrunk by 70%, which is highest in the world.

The remedy for this water crisis lies in building small feeder canals accessible through main canal passing through most Indian villages where rain water harvesting is a scattered practice, which the best known method to preserve water.

Unless the country wakes up to the multiple agrarian challenge of - 

  1. Regulating the growing demand for groundwater
  2. Prevent unnatural crops to be grown in areas , like rice in Punjab, a water guzzler, that is not supported by water table of Punjab.
  3. Formation of cooperative by small farmers
  4. Taxing of large farmers
  5. Fixing of MSP on a percentile for primary produce (diary included), amongst many other localised and specific problems.

The crisis is set to assume graver proportions that is not only regressive, but is also a cauldron of trouble that keeps the wretched corrupt politician in power making the roots of democracy starved of people and their resources and to keep them selectively poor or selectively rich through cronyism as we are witnessing today.

Let us give our basic farmers, who are rooted to the ground, a fair chance to shape a vibrant and better India once again.