Focus on agriculture as the fulcrum of economic growth

THE new government is expected to spell out a fresh policy to boost economic growth and improve consumption as well as investment. In the past decade, absolute power enabled the BJP-led government to formulate and push policies of its choosing swiftly without any concern over political opposition. Now, it is a different ballgame. The emphasis will be more on compromise and accommodation.

The chances are that economic growth will slow down a bit. Hence, the challenge will be to devise innovative ways to arrest the slide. It is hoped that technology will help turn the tide.

The government should focus particularly on agriculture. Modi 3.0 has made a good start on this front by releasing the PM Kisan Nidhi instalment of Rs 20,000 crore to transfer Rs 6,000 each per year into the bank accounts of over nine crore farmers.

But there has to be a follow-up after the sop. There has to be a new technology policy to take agriculture forward. The government can take a cue from the success story which Madhya Pradesh crafted to transform agriculture. Perhaps fittingly, former CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who did a good job in his home state, will hopefully do it at the Centre too as the new Union Agriculture and Rural Development Minister.

During the 10-year period till 2022-23, agriculture grew in MP by 6.1 per cent on an average annually compared to the national average of 3.9 per cent. One way in which this was done was not by putting under the plough virgin land but by more cropping. By cropping on the same land, the net sown area went up multiple times.

Other than effectively having more land, Madhya Pradesh was able to get more water. It did not build new canals but instead had concrete lining done for existing ones, besides desilting, cleaning and fixing breaches. Thus, the state was able to get a lot of canal areas without having to dig in entirely new ones.

There should not necessarily be any effort by the Centre to get the states to go in for all this. There may be discord between states over groundwater drawn by irrigation tubewells that run on subsidised power. The Centre needs to persuade the states to move away from this process so that the sharp drop in groundwater levels can be curbed.

The government also needs to spur agriculture by bringing in new technology. The use of fertilisers, which helped usher in the Green Revolution, is becoming passe. New technology is needed to protect crops from pests, pathogens and weeds.

Mechanisation and agronomic intervention can be promoted. Tractors have practically replaced bullocks. Now, there are new ploughs that can do deep tillage, mix pulverised soil and break hardpan layers.

There is also new technology for irrigation — drip irrigation and laser land levellers which place seeds and fertilisers. What can be done can be visualised from the fact there are pomegranates being grown in Rajasthan on arid land through drip irrigation and water-soluble liquid fertilisers.

When it comes to the new technologies for which the Centre is seeking support from the states, there is an overriding concern. The country needs to preserve land, water and air so that its citizens, who now number the largest in the world, are able to grow enough to preserve themselves. They also need to be able to cope with heat and pollution.

The new policies which have to be evolved must make the Centre and the states put their heads together so that biodiversity is preserved. The ever-growing number of people must be able to survive and thrive in a sustainable manner.

But the good news from academics is that if farmers follow the right practices, yields can return to normal levels after some time. What is needed are policy decisions with better and more scientific evidence instead of going back to nature as Sri Lanka attempted to do by trying to do away with fertilisers and Sikkim ventured to do as well.

The need of the hour is to promote precision farming, which can give us more from less. Geographical information system, artificial intelligence and machine learning, which can use enormous data to bring about precision in farming, the use of sensors, drones, LEOs (low earth orbits), space technologies and cloud computing are all bursting out to provide the basis for a revolutionary epoch. Drips, hydroponics and aeroponics are available to get much more with very little exploitation of the planet’s natural resources.

But what stands in the way of this is the political economy. Huge amounts of subsidy have been handed out by way of free power, free water and urea with 80-90 per cent subsidy. The subsidies may have been good in the 1960s and 1970s to meet the country’s food deficit, but this has been continuing. Farmers in the northwestern region are continuing to grow the same paddy, wheat and sugarcane with state subsidy.

The initiative by the government to enact new farming laws was negated by a long, revolutionary agitation. There is now an absolute need to ensure limited use of natural resources. The irrational exploitation of nature’s wealth must be severely curtailed, if not stopped eventually. This is what the new government must try to do. To be able to do this, the Centre will need to have a dialogue and reach an agreement with the states. These are the new dynamics which the election outcome has handed down.