Future of India's Agriculture
State of India’s Agriculture in 2020:
In the year 2010, nobody would have expected that India’s agriculture would become so tech savvy as it is today. The reasons for this are numerous. But the credit should go to the recent five year plan which laid a lot of emphasis on improving agriculture in India and taking it to the next level. Let us see the sequence of events of what has happened in the past. As we all know agriculture is the main livelihood for majority of India’s population. India has benefitted greatly from the Green revolution and the food production has increased drastically. Agriculture has got a substantial share in India’s GDP till late 1980’s. But after the liberalization, we started concentrating more on the services sector and the share of agriculture in India’s GDP has reduced drastically even though the percentage of population dependent on it was still close to 60%. Also due to rising input and labour costs agriculture has become less attractive over the years. Due to the boom in services and manufacturing sectors the new generation started flocking to urban areas abandoning the agriculture. The other reasons that contributed to this were lack of minimum support prices, extremely uncertain climatic conditions and the neglect on the part of the government to solve the issues related to agriculture. Owing to all these reasons the state of agriculture has started getting worsened from 2010-11. During the years 2013-2017, the average agriculture growth rate was below 1%. Sensing that the situation is going out of hand the planning commission has taken a lot of progressive steps in the 13th five year plan (2017-2022).Foolproof systems have been put in place to provide the minimum support prices to farmers. Advanced farming techniques have been publicized aggressively in rural India and technical equipment has been provided at heavily subsidized prices. These things helped greatly to reduce the dependence on labour and have minimized the
In the year 2010, nobody would have expected that India’s agriculture would become so tech savvy as it is today. The reasons for this are numerous. But the credit should go to the recent five year plan which laid a lot of emphasis on improving agriculture in India and taking it to the next level. Let us see the sequence of events of what has happened in the past. As we all know agriculture is the main livelihood for majority of India’s population. India has benefitted greatly from the Green revolution and the food production has increased drastically. Agriculture has got a substantial share in India’s GDP till late 1980’s. But after the liberalization, we started concentrating more on the services sector and the share of agriculture in India’s GDP has reduced drastically even though the percentage of population dependent on it was still close to 60%. Also due to rising input and labour costs agriculture has become less attractive over the years. Due to the boom in services and manufacturing sectors the new generation started flocking to urban areas abandoning the agriculture. The other reasons that contributed to this were lack of minimum support prices, extremely uncertain climatic conditions and the neglect on the part of the government to solve the issues related to agriculture. Owing to all these reasons the state of agriculture has started getting worsened from 2010-11. During the years 2013-2017, the average agriculture growth rate was below 1%. Sensing that the situation is going out of hand the planning commission has taken a lot of progressive steps in the 13th five year plan (2017-2022).Foolproof systems have been put in place to provide the minimum support prices to farmers. Advanced farming techniques have been publicized aggressively in rural India and technical equipment has been provided at heavily subsidized prices. These things helped greatly to reduce the dependence on labour and have minimized the