ON FEBRUARY 28, 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared his dream of doubling farmers’ income by the time the country celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2022, at a farmer rally in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. The government has spent five years chasing that dream. Now, less than 20 months from the deadline, the government’s own data says that agricultural growth is nowhere close to realising that dream. As per Economic Survey 2019-20, released on January 31, 2020, the annual growth rate of agriculture and its allied sectors in real terms was 2.88 per cent between 2014-15 and 2018-19. The estimated growth rate in 2019-20 is 2.9 per cent.
After Modi’s declaration in 2016, experts had said that farmers’ incomes would need to grow at 14.86 per cent per year to double by 2022. The Ashok Dalwai Committee Report on Doubling of Farmers’ Income says that taking 2015-16 as the base year, the farmers’ income can double by 2022-23. But in a policy paper released in March 2017, Niti Aayog member Ramesh Chand says that farmers’ income needs to grow at 10.4 per cent, not 14.86 per cent, to achieve the target. Chand also says that the productivity of India’s crop sector grew at 3.1 per cent in 2001-2014. At that rate, income from farms would go up by 18.7 per cent in seven years (from 2014 to 2021).
The government also wants to add income generated from livestock to achieve the target. If that is done, farmers’ income is estimated to go up by 27.5 per cent by 2022, as per Chand. And by combining the increase of income from both livestock and dairy, a rise of 107.5 per cent can be achieved by 2025, as per Chand. But how much real progress has been made in this regard so far?
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