discuss the problem which agriculture sector is facing in India
Answers
Answer:
Lack of Organized Agricultural Marketing:
Indian farmers are facing the problem of low income from their marketable surplus crops in the absence of proper organized markets and adequate transportation facilities. Scattered and sub-divided holdings are also creating serious problem for marketing their products.
Explanation:
Answer:
1. Inequality in Land Distribution:
The distribution of agricultural land in India has not been fairly distributed. Rather there is a considerable degree of concentration of land holding among the rich landlords, farmers and money lenders throughout the country. But the vast majority of small farmers own a very small and uneconomic size of holdings, resulting to higher cost per units. Moreover, a huge number of landless cultivators has been cultivating on the land owned by the absentee landlords, leading to lack of incentives on the part of these cultivators.
2. Land Tenure System:
The land tenure system practiced in India is suffering from lot of defects. Insecurity of tenancy was a big problem for the tenants, particularly during the pre- independence period. Although the land tenure system has been improving during the post-independence period after the introduction of various land reforms measures but the problem of insecurity of tenancy and eviction still prevails to some extent due to the presence of absentee landlords and benami transfer of land in various states of the country.
3. Sub-division and Fragmentation of holdings:
In India, the average size of holding is expected to decline from 1.5 hectares in 1990-91 to 1.3 hectares in 2000-01. Thus the size of agricultural holding is quite uneconomic, small and fragmented. There is continuous sub-division and fragmentation of agricultural land due to increasing pressure of population and breakdown of the joint family system and also due to forced selling of land for meeting debt repayment obligations. Thus the size of operational holdings has been declining year by year leading to increase in the number of marginal and small holdings and fall in the number of medium and large holdings.
4. Cropping Pattern:
The cropping pattern which shows the proportion of the area under different crops at a definite point of time is an important indicator of development and diversification of the sector. Food crops and non-food or cash crops arc the two types of crops produced by the agricultural sector of the country.
As the prices of the cash crops are becoming more and more attractive therefore, more and more land have been diverted from the production of food crops into cash or commercial crops. This has been creating the problem of food crisis in the country. Thus after 50 years planning the country has failed to evolve a balanced cropping pattern leading to faulty agricultural planning and its poor implementation.
5. Instability and Fluctuations:
Indian agriculture is continuously subjected to instability arising out of fluctuations in weather and gamble of monsoon. As a result, the production of food-grains and other crops fluctuates widely leading to continuous fluctuation of prices of agricultural crops. This has created the element of instability in the agricultural operation of the country.
6. Conditions of Agricultural Labourers:
Agricultural labourers are the most exploited unorganized class in the rural population of the country. From the very beginning landlords and Zamindars exploited these labourers for their benefit and converted some of them as slaves or bonded labourers and forced to continue the system generation after generation. All these led to wretched condition and total deprivation of the rural masses.
After 50 years of independence, the situation has improved marginally. But as they remain unorganized, thus economic exploitation of these workers continues. The level of income, the standard of living and the rate of wages remained abnormally low.
Total number of agricultural workers has increased from 55.4 million in 1981 to 74.6 million in 1991 which constituted nearly 23.5 per cent of the total working population of the country. This increasing number has been creating the problem of surplus labour or disguised unemployment, which in turn is pushing (heir wage rates below the subsistence level.
7. Agricultural Indebtedness:
One of the greatest problems of Indian agriculture is its growing indebtedness. The rural people are borrowing a heavy amount of loan regularly for meeting their requirements needed for production, consumption and also for meeting their social commitments. Thus the debt passes from generation to generation. Indian farmers fall into the debt trap as a result of crop failure, poor income arising out of low prices of crops, exorbitantly high rate of interest charged by the moneylenders, manipulation and use of loan accounts by the moneylenders and use of loan for various unproductive social purposes.
Although they borrow every year but they are not in a position to repay their loans regularly as because either loans are larger or their agricultural production is not sufficient enough to repay their past debt. Thus the debt of farmers gradually increases leading to the problem of rural indebtedness in our country. Thus it is quite correct to observe that “Indian farmer is born in debt, lives in debt and dies in debt.”