India is still in the developing stages. The major issues
hindering the development in India are- Poverty, lack of education, corruption,
unsteady industrial growth, bad legislation and so on. The others are quite
eradicable if adequate measures are taken. Poverty is not a petty problem.
Maximum population comes from rural areas and therefore poverty is something
which would be very difficult to eradicate.
Agriculture is India’s major occupation. The economy is
striving on the agricultural produce and its export. But the incidence of
poverty is on a persisting high due to backward agriculture. The production per
hectare and per capita is very low. This is not only because of over-population
but also because of very low production which is only about 60% of the world
average.
State of Punjab has the productivity potential equivalent to
that of the developed countries. If India is to attain the same productivity
potential as of Punjab, its production would be more than double than what it
is today. If the vast untapped potential of the Indian agriculture, the amount
and quality of scientific knowledge and the positive response of the farmers,
neither Indian agriculture should remain backward nor our people should be the
poorest in the world.
India has about 40 million
ha of land which lies unutilised. We still depend on natural resources to grow
our crops. Farmers still rely on rains as the source of water. They cannot
afford irrigation to supply water to their crops. Due to lack of awareness and
education, they do not benefit from the various schemes of the government.
Thus, the condition of agriculture remains backward no matter the kind of steps
that are taken to develop it.
Due to this dependability, the production is of very low
quantity and quality. Thus, the farmers lose a large share of crops in
destruction. They are forced to sell the crops at a much lower costs which
hardly recover their capital. Most of them incur losses leading to bad debts
and increased credits. This results in more and more poverty among already
poverty struck areas.
Considering rate of agricultural
growth, the factors determining its distribution across farm sizes, its impact
on tenancy conditions, its effect on the demand for labour, etc, the increase
in poverty is just massive as all these factors get affected with backward
agriculture. The growth of agricultural output has only just kept pace with the
growth of the rural population which results in stagnation in output per head.
If a regression analysis is done
between the incidence of poverty and agricultural performance, we find that
improved agricultural performance is definitely associated with reductions in
the incidence of poverty. Fluctuation in poverty incidence simply mirrors the
movement in agricultural production per head and this inverse relationship is
even more firmly identifiable when account is taken of the lags involved.
The evidence on the relationship between rural poverty and
agricultural performance is more difficult to evaluate for two reasons. In the
first place, the evidence itself is somewhat mixed. Much depends upon the level
of aggregation at which the analysis if conducted with the all-India results
presenting a somewhat different picture from that obtained at the level of
individual states. Furthermore, the evidence necessarily is difficult to
interpret since we are implicitly searching for causal relationships in what
are at best observed correlations.
Maya Chandrashekaran
FSLE -3
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