How do we ensure food supply to people of all sections of our country ?
Answers
Urbanisation and growing non-agricultural business establishments in rural India have led to shrinking cultivation area. However, through increasing productivity by growing High Yielding Varieties (HYV), India is food secure. India’s foodgrain production increased from 50.82 million tonnes in 1950-51 to more than 260 million tonnes at present. But food security has to be examined in terms of availability, accessibility, utilization and vulnerability. Therefore, apart from production policies and programmes relating to buffer stocking, distribution, monitoring prices become important.
Food security, both at the national and household levels, has been the focus of agricultural development in India ever since the mid-sixties when import dependence for cereals had gone up to 16 percent. The new approach intended at maximizing the production of cereals and involved building a foundation of food security on three key elements including provision of an improved agricultural technology package to the farmers, delivery of modern farm inputs, technical know-how and institutional credit to the farmer. The performance of agriculture, however, has not been satisfactory. The share of agriculture in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has registered a steady decline from 36.4 percent in 1982-83 to 13.7 percent in 2015-16. But agricultural sector continues to support more than half a billion people providing employment to 52 percent of the workforce.