New Delhi: Agriculture in India is like a child in an Indian family presented with three “impossible asks,” former IAS officer and agriculture secretary of Madhya Pradesh Pravesh Sharma declared in front of an audience. The three demands from Indian agriculture are global competitiveness, environmental sustainability, and social inclusiveness.
Without dwelling on the past too much, Sharma was quick to draw attention to the crisis currently imploding within the agriculture industry. He noted that while industrial and telecom services policies gradually moved toward the global best practices post-1991, Indian farming didn’t.
Agriculture became “a walled-off garden”, resulting in the sector “remaining static in a ’60s-70s mindset.” The reason was the neglect of the farming sector.
Problems with the agriculture sector
On 30 May, former bureaucrats, scientists, researchers, and businessmen involved in the agriculture sector gathered at the India International Centre (IIC) for a talk on a pressing question: Can agri-startups trigger the transformation of Indian agriculture?
Apart from Sharma, the speaker of the evening, the session had former secretary Siraj Hussain as the chair and Deepak Pental, a genetics professor and former Delhi University vice-chancellor. Sharma shared his rich experience in agricultural ventures since leaving government service eight years ago.
The talk, which went on for over 1.5 hours, went beyond agri-tech startups or the economics of agriculture to provide a wider perspective on the problems faced by the sector and the measures needed to alleviate them. Several agriculture-related government decisions—which caused an uproar on the streets—were mentioned with clinical precision, bereft of politics.
Sharma’s stint with the government and later as an agri-entrepreneur gave him a Janus-like view—both at past government achievements and future challenges in a more liberalised economy. He proudly claimed India’s “greatest achievement since 1947” was achieving food security, which he argued is the only sector where the country did better than China.
“This [neglect of the agriculture sector] has now become such a witch’s brew that even the government with its mandate to try to do something in 2020 had to back off. Perhaps those well-intentioned moves did not address or tend to exacerbate some of the existing challenges that large numbers of farm households were going through at that time,” Sharma said.
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Is agri-tech a silver bullet?
According to Sharma, forty years of neglecting agriculture has reduced the sector to barely contributing a third to income generation. Both public and private investment in agriculture has fallen. A natural and human resources crisis is crippling the sector. Soil quality is dipping and men are swapping the farm life to become delivery workers in cities.
Sharma said that in this scenario, a section of people are expecting that “agri-tech is going to be perhaps one of the silver bullets to lead us out of the mess”.
The picture is grim. Of the 1,17,254 startups in this country, barely 3,000 are classified as agri-tech startups and only 1,500 are still alive. Of the 100-odd Indian unicorns—a company valued at $1 billion or above—not even one is an agri-tech company.
To make matters worse, these ventures are going through a “fundraising winter”. Sharma shared contrasting figures showing that Indian startups raised $29 billion in funds in 2021, whereas agri-tech raised $1.1 billion. These numbers plummeted to $8 billion for all startups in 2023, with agri-tech raising a meagre $300 million.
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Need better agriculture policies
According to Sharma, a comprehensive policy, like the one during the early 2000s, is necessary for the agri-tech-led revolution to address the farm crisis.
“It was Mr Vajpayee’s very courageous decision to overrule the Swadeshi Jagran Manch and allow wheat and cotton strains to be embedded in our seed companies, which led to that revolution. It was the investment in research by private sector companies in hybrid maize which led to the maize revolution,” said Sharma, who had also worked as part of Vajpayee’s PMO.
He also called for “an overall framework” of private investment in agriculture. Sharma laid out that the bulk of investment in agri-tech will not come from FDI or startups but from domestic sources, both public and private.
“It is the Indian private sector which is holding back on investment in agri-technology because they do not see a clear path,” he said.
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New technologies and farmers’s scepticism
The cloudy future of agri-tech research and the government’s policies have impeded new farming technologies from reaching India. An instance of this is the private sector not being allowed to collaborate with state universities for seed testing.
“You have to recognise IPR (intellectual property rights). This touches on some aspects of cutting-edge technology at our borders but does not come in until [the stakeholders] get some assurance that their IPR is going to be protected,” he added.
Farmers, meanwhile, approach this new age of agri-technology with a “great amount of scepticism”. The answer to integrating farmers with agri-tech investors and players is still elusive.
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Stagnant future of agriculture
Sharma’s presentation was followed by Professor Deepak Pental’s remarks. The academic bluntly expressed that he didn’t see “any positive signs” in the agriculture sector.
“We have a large number of PhDs and KVKs (Krishi Vigyan Kendra). But unfortunately, people are not trained to deal with the latest or the past 15-20 years’ developments in agriculture. So we are looking at a stagnant future in agriculture,” he said. He was referring to agriculture not being able to integrate AI because the ecosystem doesn’t enable the use of data centres.
“What we require is investments in [agri] technology development. The IT tools are already there to spread the good technology very fast, far and wide,” he said.
Pental stressed the need for good agricultural research and suggested the government make 3-4 crops commercial and provide full IP protection to the technology. This will allow for the cultivation of disease-resistant, hybrid crops.
“Supposing, we have agreed at the seed level a technology to deal with pink bollworms in cotton today. Believe you me, that technology will go to the farmers in no time,” he said.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
Yet Indian agri is able to produce enough grain/cereals for most of the country – and FCI has a storage problem?
Yet there are “bumper crops” announced every season…how?
All said and done what really matters at the end of the Day is viable land holdings. A couple of acres which the Indian Farmer owns is unviable. We must understand that feeding one fifth of the World’s population on 2% of the World’s arable land is going to be an onerous task. Our falling yields and sinking food reserves is worrisome.
1.The land ceiling act must go.
2.Buying land should be encouraged and interest rates should be minimum..
3.The Farmer’s own land can serve as a collateral for borrowing funds for expansion making these loans safe.
4.The educated and intelligent farmer boys are city bound leaving the ones who lag in studies and are laid back to actively farm, leading to lazy agriculture practices. We need the smarter boys to farm. Who likes doing a business with no expansion avenues.
5. Thus small holdings will sell leading to consolidated viable holdings and better farm practices . Finance would be freed for more enterprises for the small land holders.
6. Incentives for sustainable agriculture practices plus water preservation should be generously provided.
Finally Corporates should be discouraged because their quest for rising profits will end up abusing land and ruining it.
The above is my 45 year agriculture experience as an Engineer who decided to farm. Yes Indian farming needs looking into but not in a Bookish Beaureocratic way.
The final take, 55% of this Nation depends on Agriculture for a livelihood and the City bred Beaureocrat needs to step more often into Rural India and have a hands down experience about agriculture. Seriously readers rural distress is a reality and the 2024 election is a pointer when rural vote percentages are analysed.
No politician in India has the guts to implement free-trade in agriculture.