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 India is a developing country with the second largest population in the world. The per capita income in India is rising at a fast pace – at the rate of 7.2 per cent in 2007-08, says the Economic Survey 2007-08. This is improving the purchasing power of the people. Thus, accelerating the demand for more nutritious food. So, why is the country food insecure? The problem here is not the growing demand for food. It is the imbalance in our food economy. Not clear? Let me explain… The rise in per capita income is a reflection of only one half of the people of the country – the urban poor and middle-class. The other half – the rural poor – has experienced no such rapid growth in income. The ‘richer’ group spends a lot of their new income on food, stressing the supply and ultimately, shooting up the prices. But, the rural poor face these higher food prices with no greater income. So, the rich continue to grow, while the poor starve to death.
History stands witness to a similar situation… The world’s worst recorded food disaster, known as the Bengal Famine, happened in 1943 in British-ruled India. An estimated four million people died of hunger that year alone in eastern India (including Bangladesh). Acute shortage of food production in the area is seen as the main reason behind this famine. But a closer look will  reveal another aspect. “The poor who lived in cities (urban poor) experienced rapidly rising incomes, especially in Calcutta, where huge expenditures for the war against Japan caused a boom that quadrupled food prices. The rural poor faced these skyrocketing prices with little increase in income”, writes Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen in his article The Rich Get Hungrier. And misdirected government policy worsened the catastrophe. The situation is almost the same now. Only larger and more ominous is scale. One part of the country is prospering day by day, while the other one is becoming more and more food insecure. The challenge lies in feeding the growing population equally. So, food production or supply has to keep pace with the rising demand, and lower the food prices. But, this is a major area of concern because the country is struggling to make the right choices and take the right decisions. Here are some of the main dilemmas.
Even after Independence in 1947, India continued to reel under the repercussions of the Famine. In the mid-1960s, food insecurity reached dangerous proportions. So India launched the Green Revolution. You have probably heard or read about this path breaking initiative already. The basic mantra was to boost food production by stepping up efforts to improve productivity of land. For this, more tracts were brought under cultivation, special agricultural inputs like high yielding varieties of seeds, fertilisers were used in the farms, and crores were spent on irrigation facilities, sourcing water from dams or from the underground. Of course, the efforts paid dividends, and India had growing stock of surplus food grains by the mid-1970s. Unfortunately, our policy planners forgot to take measures to counter the impact that this super-intensive productivity was bound to have in the long run — on the health of the land and water resources. Result? The damages have now become glaring, while the benefits are petering off. For example in Punjab, agricultural growth was merely 1.86 per cent in 2006-07, while the water table in large parts of central Punjab today is below 10 metres. Ground reality You see, irrigation is the key to agricultural growth, and the government has focused on big dams to ensure that the farmers got enough for their lands. So huge sums have been invested to build these gigantic, concrete structures to store, check and regulate the flow of our numerous rivers. But the strategy obviously has not worked. By the 80s, the area cultivated by groundwater overtook that of dams and canals. Today, approximately 62.4 million hectares of land, accounting for 75 to 80 per cent of the total land under irrigation, is sustained by groundwater. This, in turn, has given rise to yet another crisis. More than two-thirds of India today can be divided into two zones: groundwater scarce and acutely groundwater scarce. So there is no room for any doubt or conjecture any more.
Then what is the other option? It is rain-fed agriculture. WHAT IS RAIN-FED AGRICULTURE? In the rain-fed zones, farmers depend exclusively on the monsoons to water their crops. In India, rain-fed regions cover 177 districts. Actually, going by the literal meaning of ‘rain-fed’, many more areas can come under it. After all, tanks, wells, and traditional water bodies are also ‘rain-fed’. For that matter, even the water in the surface irrigation system is rain-fed.
Rain-fed agriculture can be the answer to our national food security. For maintaining food security even at the current nutritional levels, about 100 million tonnes of food grains need to be produced additionally by 2020. The total cropped area has plateaued at around 140 million hectares since 1970s. So, these areas have exhausted their production capacity. Thus, the increased yield must come from areas with the least irrigation potential and rain-fed areas (see Table: 1) But, rainfed areas are ecologically extremely fragile, even though they sustain substantial populations. One-third of the dryland areas are highly degraded, which cannot be put under cultivation. Most of the areas are affected by massive soil erosion. Moreover, rain-fed regions are highly drought-prone. On an average, these areas suffer from droughts once in every three years, which severely affect the availability of drinking water, and crop and fodder production. Western and eastern Rajasthan, Gujarat, western Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kashmir and Andhra Pradesh are most vulnerable to droughts. Even if we choose ‘where’ to produce, we need to decide ‘what’ to produce – cash crops or food crops? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
