By Yogesh Upadhyaya:
Interested in politics in India? You need to understand farming!
Want India to be a fairer and more equitable country? Got to understand farming!
Wish that India becomes the next superpower? You have to understand agriculture. Worried about the environment and about the people across the country not even getting drinking water? Yes, you guessed it right, agriculture has deep linkages with both environment and drinking water.
When we started working on our analysis of the income of small farmers we knew that we would need to understand complexity. However, we were not prepared for the extent of interlinkages that farming has with every aspect of our lives!
With more than a third of the population of the country dependent on agriculture, the concerns of farmers dominate politics and rightly so. Farmers as consumers of goods produced in factories have a deep impact on other sectors of the economy too. Unfortunately, this very large portion of the population earns a very small amount of money even while working incredibly hard. Worse, even this meager income is subject to many risks.
So, how can the income of the farmer be increased? The solution is to facilitate a farmer to grow more on his piece of land and to get more money for the crops grown. It sounds simple but given the ground realities, it is not easy to do.
We have given a few solutions in our analysis below knowing fully well that there are other solutions as well. Our analysis is meant only to be a starting point for discussion and to provide a framework for that discussion. We invite readers to go through this piece and use the comment section below to give their views, ask questions and agree or disagree with us. We also invite readers to share this InfoCapsule widely.
