BioVoice News August 2016 Issue 4 Volume 1 | Page 12

“ face to face The declining share of agriculture doesn’t mean that the absolute value of agriculture id dropping. It only means that the overall size of the economy is growing. All you have to do is to plot over time the share of agriculture of few agriculture dependent countries in last 100 years. Sometimes, I think we need to put those graphs in Indian newspapers to show that we are following the trends that have already happened globally. economy over time. This is normal and expected. It has happened in US, Europe and Japan. Infact in Japan, the agriculture GDP is now close to 1 percent. The share of employment from agri-based sector is close to 3-4 percent. It drops not because the agriculture is not an important subject in absolute terms but because in relative terms, the size of the economy begins to grow. What happens is that the when overall industry sector begins to grow, employment rate goes up. When the people say that the share of agriculture is dropping, you should say it is good. If you look at the poor Sub Saharan Africa, their share in agriculture is 60 percent. So if that would have been the case in India too, then it meant that other sectors are not growing. The declining share of agriculture doesn’t mean that the absolute value of agriculture id dropping. It only means that the overall size of the economy is growing. All you have to do is to plot over time the share of agriculture of few agriculture dependent countries in last 100 years. Sometimes, I think we need to put those graphs in Indian newspapers to show that we are following the trends that have already happened globally. It will eventually lead us to economies where situation would be that if you are working outside 12 BioVoiceNews | August 2016 the agriculture or within it, the relative returns would be equal. So if one is a farm labourer or the worker in a non-agriculture set up, the wages would be same. The equalization of wages would thus mean that we have reached the overall balanced growth. There are marginal farmers in India who don’t have any other livelihood apart from agriculture. They seem to be suffering in the modern times. Your comments. It may be true in few cases but then over period of time the things have begun to change. For small farms, the migration, remittances, service sector employment etc. I think we are not accounting for all the source of incomes. If I travel to a remote village in Orissa and list out all sources of income, I can see that there are increasingly other sources of earning money by farmers apart from farming. The sole dependence on agriculture is changing and there are diverse sources that are increasing. So when overall you add up the sources, the story changes. Government has launched many new schemes such as Krishi Bima Yojna and Soil Health Card in last few years. Do you think these will help farmers? Maintaining agriculture productivity is one of the primary means for people to grow out of agriculture. So the moment agriculture income improves, they are able to invest in their children’s education, house and thus paves a way to move out of agriculture. If you are not investing in increasing agriculture income, then you are moving the problem from rural poverty to urban poverty. But if you are investing in it, there is huge chance that you are allowing rural people to shift to urban areas with better education and money. Look at the people of my generation. We have all come from the agricultural background. The green revolution had tremendous effect on many parts of the country including Adhara Pradesh from where I come from. Back then, due to green revolution, new crops were adopted, the incomes increased resulting in people like us getting money and opportunity for education. In India, we had a period 1985-2000 when the investments were low. But now we see the more investments. Inclusion of horticulture, pulses and other food crops in the overall focus in happening which is great. Oilseeds production has increased even in dry belts of Madhya Pradesh even moving to Gujarat