Changing Farmers' Income And Agrarian Distress
Geography and You|May/June 2017

A strong trend towards agricultural diversification from food to commercial crops and from enterprise to allied activities is emerging. This shift is driven by both, state policies and the domestic market and has a bearing upon small and marginal landholders.

Elumalai Kannan
Changing Farmers' Income And Agrarian Distress

Agriculture continues to play an important role in the overall growth of the Indian economy despite a structural shift towards the service sector during recent decades. Despite a decline in the share of agriculture in national income from 55.1 per cent in 1950-51 to 13.9 per cent in 2013-14, agriculture still holds the key to transformation of India’s rural economy. But, there are many challenges too. The country achieved self-sufficiency in food production at the macro level, but still confronts massive challenges of high prevalence of malnourished children and high incidence of rural poverty.

The dependence of the rural workforce on agriculture for employment has not declined in proportion to its contribution to gross domestic product (GDP). This has resulted in widening the income disparity between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors (Chand, 2017). In this context, achieving a higher growth in agriculture assumes great importance—a matter of concern for policy planners and research scholars in recent times (Vaidyanathan 2010, Sen 2016). Sustained agricultural growth, facilitated through constant policy and institutional support, has the potential to augment growth in the rural economy and associated secondary activities such as food processing and retail trading. However, agriculture-led rural industrialisation has not received due attention from policy makers in the country notwithstanding the fact that maintaining the growth of agriculture per se was lost sight of during the 1990s (Bhalla and Singh 2009). After a splendid growth performance during the 1980s, agriculture’s decline during the 1990s was attributed to the reduction in and/or stagnation of public expenditure on agricultural infrastructure, defunct extension services and biased economic reforms (Mahendradev 2000; Vyas 2001; Rao 2003).

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