Why is growth rate in agriculture decreasing.
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Agriculture Growth Rate in India GDP has slowed down for the production in this sector has reduced over the years. The agricultural sector has had low production due to a number of factors such as illiteracy, insufficient finance, and inadequate marketing of agricultural products.
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India is basically an Agricultural society, where close to 59% of our population is dependent on it. Past 20 years of economic reforms has brought growth in services and manufacturing sectors but contribution of Agriculture has been coming down. It is now currently close to 15% of GDP as per Government of India statistics. During last fiscal year 2010-2011, Agriculture growth has been 3.28% against the expected 4.0%. It has became least the preferred employment opportunity. In-spite of having bumper crops every year, we still house most hungry and malnutrition people in whole world. The food prices are raising, but this is not transforming into income growth to Agriculture. Is Indian agriculture is a paradox? , so what are the factors leading to this dichotomous situation.
Land Holdings
Since many people are employed in Agriculture, and land being very limited resource, the average holdings of a farmer is less compared to other countries like US or China. The marginal farmers form bulk of agricultural force, but there land holdings is less compared to top 10% who hold close to 54% of agricultural land[Report of Agiculture Indebtedness by Expert Group, Radha Krishna Committee]. About 60% of farmers have land less 0.4 hectares and another 20 % of farmers own around 1.4 hectares [ Increase Productivity Rapidly, by Krishna Kothai, published in Survey of Indian Agriculture 2011, The Hindu Group]. This severe inequality of land holding among farmers will reduce earnings per farmer. The Land Ceiling Act, whose primary role to curtail holding excessive land, is fraught with many loop holes. Land being state subject, each state has there own Land ceiling acts, with different sizes and some states made laws based on amount of land holding per Family. We have put classification on type of land that we can hold like based on quality like best, second class and others. [http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/articles/venka/index.php?repts=m-land.htm ]. This has encouraged many Benami holdings. So much of the fertile land is been transferred to Private companies instances like UP express highway project, Tata Nano Project etc for Development and Real Estate projects. The law which supports Land Acquisition Act is very antique [dated back to 1894, later reformed around 1980’s] and it were severely misused for acquiring Land. Apart from this Government track record of maintaining authentic Land Records is abysmal. Unless we come up with Land Reforms, it will be ailing the growth of Agriculture.
Green Revolution
Many people have came in support of Green Revolution, there is no denying that it was necessary during that time to mitigate hunger and food scarcity. The crop productivity has increased tremendously with introduction of hybrid seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. It made farmers in states like Punjab and Haryana rich. Later Seeds industry was opened to Multinational companies like Montaso, Bayer. With profits being sole objective, these companies have introduced spurious variety of seeds. The genuine seeds are no longer available in market. Even though they gave short term benefits, but In long run it has dented severely our traditional agriculture practice. Excessive use of Fertilizers/Pesticides not only degraded soil/ground water quality but also made farmers more dependent on them . This has raised input costs. The new pest resistant hybrid seeds work for only short time, but over time they have all proved to be futile. BT Cotton is a very good example to corroborate this fact. The farmers ignore crop rotation techniques, l Most of the farmers don’t have good education about farming concepts, and role of Agricultural universities in educating farmers is very poor. This lack of guidance is making them to use modern technology without proper guidance, leading to destruction. Crop rotation technique, Organic Fertilizers (like Cow dung) and Soil Conservation Many Farmers are still averse to Sustainability agricultural owing to volatile nature of Agriculture. Long term sustainability was missing in Green Revolution.