Business Standard Budget 2018: Despite record harvests in 2017, why farmers still struggle
Budget 2018: Despite record harvest, why are 600 million Indians struggling to get by Indian farms produced record harvests in 2017, and the government’s agricultural budget rose 111% over four years to 2017-18. Yet, prices crashed, 8,007 farmers committed suicide in 2015, unpaid agricultural
loans rose 20% between 2016 and 2017, and 600 million Indians who depend on agriculture are struggling to get by. This is the situation that faces the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government as it heads into its last full budget 2018 before general elections in 2019, at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised a doubling of farm incomes by 2022. The agriculture sector will not just watch how much money is set aside in the 2018-19 budget but also how it is used, as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) also tries to woo disaffected farmers before upcoming assembly elections in eight states–Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and the northeastern states of Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura. Agriculture is the government’s “top priority”, finance minister Arun Jaitley said on January 15, 2018, admitting that “farmers were not getting the right price for their produce”. That is an acknowledgment that record harvests and government spending are not significantly improving India’s agricultural crisis. Fewer Indians farm, record harvests, but falling income India has seen a decline in the proportion of “cultivators”–as the census calls farmers who own or rent land–from 50% in 1951 to 24% in 2011, as IndiaSpend reported on August 8, 2014. Yet, nearly half of India’s population, or about 600 million people, still depend on agriculture. India harvested a record 276 million tonnes–all-time highs were reported for rice, wheat, pulses, tur (pigeon pea), urad (black gram) and coarse cereals–4.01% higher than the previous record in 2013-14, according to the fourth advance estimates for the rabi (winter) and kharif (monsoon) crops for 2016-17........read more