Failing Agriculture and Frazzled Farmers: The Inside Story of India’s Most Populous States—UP and Maharashtra

Distress of agriculture and disquietude of farmers remain a matter of grave concern for the Indian economy. The deceleration in growth of production and productivity, increase in unviability of agriculture, decimal rate of growth of farmers’ income, steep rise in their indebtedness, surge in risk and uncertainty caused by frequent crop failures, etc. have acquired all India character and brought the sector to the brink and made life tough for those dependent on it. The popular debate whether it is crisis of the sector or that of the peasantry seems futile and infructuous as the present crisis engulfs both and its conceptualization and interventions required to negotiate it warrants integrating them. The present write up captures crisis of agriculture by developing an index incorporating indicators that reflect situation of agriculture and the agriculturists in an effort to establish that condition is really alarming, and the crisis of agriculture is slowly engulfing the whole nation. The paper uses secondary data collected from Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Department of Agriculture and Cooperation, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India and different States and chooses and normalizes indicators using UNDP methodology, to first compute state-level crisis of agriculture for fourteen major states of India and then at the regional and district level for two most populous states of India Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. It ranks the geographical units in terms of the index to establish that though crisis is more acute in states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, etc. but low-intensity crisis exists also in states like UP, Bihar, MP where things are normally stated to be in order. Further, based on primary survey conducted of over one thousand farming households of different farm size and social categories in three worst affected districts each for UP and Maharashtra, the crisis of agriculture is captured at the farmers level for more comprehensive set of indicators using principal component analysis. A simple linear regression has been used to determine the respective weights of individual indicators in construction of the composite index. The work concludes that agriculture and farmers face high- and low-intensity crisis, respectively, in states of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, however, the intensity within a particular state varies across regions with acute problem in some regions and relatively relaxed status in some other. It explores the inter-connectedness between level of development of a region and position of farmers and agriculture there and finds no perceptible flow. A deeper investigation of the problem at the farmers’ level helps the authors to conclude that the problem of crisis has social orientation, i.e. it varies across farmer caste groups (with high intensity of crisis among farmers belonging to the lower caste) and landholding size (with graver problem for small and marginal farmers). The paper calls for decentralised policy interventions to tackle region-specific issues and adoption of farmer centric policy to resurrect the sagging spirit of frazzled farmers and rekindle a hope in them that agriculture is not failing and has a distinct future as a profession.