Doubling farm income in India: Strategies and options

With dedicated contribution from farming community, India's agricultural sector stands as one of the biggest in the world in terms of production of foodgrains, fruits, vegetables and milk. But, the Indian farmers have been passing through a painful phase over the last two decades because of poor income from farming, which resulted in increased farm indebtedness and widespread farm suicides. To remove the misery of farmers, the Union Government has been working towards doubling farmers’ income by 202223, which was envisaged in the year 2015–16. This paper discusses various strategies that can be considered to double farmers’ income at the specified timeline. It underlines that it is difficult to achieve the goal of doubling farmers’ income, if we continue to focus mainly on the conventional production centric strategies without giving adequate importance to fixing remunerative prices for crops and improving the overall agricultural marketing condition. The paper specifically stresses that radical market reforms such as strengthening of agricultural market infrastructures, improved procurement system covering all foodgrain and non-foodgrain crops and all states, implementation of price deficiency payment system for crops, fixing MSP based on C2 cost formula, abolishment of minimum export price for agricultural commodities, removing agri-commodities from the list of essential commodities act and enacting act on ‘right to sell at MSP’ need immediate attention to double farmers’ income.