Doubling farmers’ income: An action research initiative in Bihar (India)

Agriculture is the backbone of Bihar's economy. It still provides employment to nearly 77% of workforce and generating nearly 24.84% of the State Domestic Product. Agricultural growth is not keeping pace with the growth in other economic sectors and is lagging behind the manufacturing and service sectors, further, share of agriculture in state GDP has fallen steeply over years. It is with this background, the Government of India has set a policy target of doubling farmers’ income by 2022. This is a herculean task whose gravity can be understood by the fact that Indian farmer’s income has increased only 3 folds in the last 30 years (1983-2013) on constant prices. This goal of doubling farmer’s income has met with response varying from doomed failure to optimism. This project is being proposed to evaluate the potential of doubling farmers income by socio-technical interventions across a diverse social groups having varied resource base i.e., Medium, small, marginal, sub-marginal and landless farmers. The approach to double the farmers’ income can be two pronged strategy, by increasing production and productivity or by reducing cost of cultivation/production. Keeping the above facts in mind the present study is proposed to access the impact before and after providing a full proof agriculture technological help to a selected village for a period of at least three years.