Freedom from hunger and poverty – Opinion News

By Ashok Gulati

India's 78th Independence Day is an opportunity to look back at our greatest achievements and learn from our mistakes so that we can move faster towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi's dream of Viksit Bharat@2047. We still have quite a long way to go, but to achieve this ambitious goal, we need to clearly define our milestones every three to five years until 2047.

This will help us measure our progress in a given time frame and, if necessary, change our policies and strategy during course corrections. But India is not alone on this planet. If we become Viksit in 2047, where would the other major countries be, especially our neighbor China?

Two fundamental duties of the state are to secure its borders and ensure peace and prosperity for its people. I am not an expert on border security, but suffice it to say that India has managed this quite well so far, despite minor wars with Pakistan and China. But with China's rapid rise, both economically and militarily, the border challenge is becoming increasingly worrying. Moreover, almost all our neighbouring countries are moving closer to China and away from India. We need better policy and diplomacy.

But domestic peace and prosperity are primarily due to freedom from hunger and poverty. When India gained independence in 1947, over 75% of its population lived in extreme poverty. We also have memories of British India when it suffered the Bengal famine of 1943, in which an estimated 1.5 to 3 million people starved to death.

However, the biggest debacle in terms of food security occurred in our neighbouring country China, where an estimated 30 million people starved to death during the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961. In both countries, populations exploded in the 1960s and feeding the population was a major challenge. Both countries were saved by the introduction of new technologies in agriculture, which led to the Green Revolution in India in the late 1960s and brought an almost similar breakthrough in China.

China learned its lesson much earlier than India and in 1978 initiated economic reforms that began with agriculture. It abolished the commune system, moved to a system of household ownership and freed the prices of most of its products from state controls. As a result, China's peasantry doubled its real income in just six years, increasing by more than 14% per year between 1978 and 1984.

These rising real incomes in rural areas formed the demand base for the industrial products produced by companies in cities and villages. Today, China is the center of global industry and its per capita income in dollar terms is almost five times that of India. And its agriculture generates almost twice as much value as India on a smaller area of ​​cultivated land.

China has not only opened up the land leasing markets for 30 years, but also provides enormous support to its farmers, especially through income support per hectare and also through market price support. This support (estimate of producer support) [PSE]) is even higher than the average farmer in OECD countries. India's PSE, on the other hand, is negative, meaning that the country actually burdens its farmers through restrictive trade and marketing policies, even as it provides subsidies for inputs such as fertilizers or electricity.

We must also remember that China enforced the one-child rule from 1981 to 2016, which contributed to a faster increase in per capita income. We can learn a lot from this experiment. Although India cannot and should not go down this path, investing in girls' education is crucial to curbing population growth, especially in the lower income brackets.

India's agricultural growth has been relatively moderate. Over the 20 years from 2004-05 to 2023-24, under the Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi governments, agricultural GDP grew by an average of 3.6%.

This is more or less enough to feed the country, whose population growth has declined over the years and is now less than 1% per year. India is also a net exporter of agricultural products. Its exports in the last three years have been around $51 billion and imports around $34 billion. While exports are wide-ranging from rice to seafood, spices, buffalo meat, etc., imports are heavily concentrated in edible oils and pulses.

In pulses, the government insists on self-sufficiency, but the reality is that this will not happen under business as usual. If the policy on pulses does not change for the better, I fear that our imports could increase to 8-10 million tonnes by 2030, as demand is likely to reach 40 million tonnes and production has been fluctuating between 22-25 million tonnes for the past seven-eight years.

Pulses use less water and fertilizers. If we reward them with the subsidies we pay for rice cultivation in the form of power and fertilizer subsidies, we can achieve not only self-sufficiency in pulses but also much healthier diets and better soil, water and environment (greenhouse gas emissions). In the case of the Punjab-Haryana belt, our research at ICRIER suggests giving Rs 35,000 per hectare for at least five years to farmers who switch from rice to pulses. This requires a bold policy but is doable provided the central and states join hands.

Other policy measures that need to be taken are agricultural research and development, irrigation, opening up of tenancy markets and setting up value chains for perishable food on the AMUL model. Only then can India achieve sustainable food security in the face of climate change. However, food security remains a major challenge. About 35% of our children under five are developmentally stunted. We need to move from food security to nutritional security.

The author is a distinguished professor at ICRIER.

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