To be fair to them, post independent governments, both central and state, have undertaken innumerable studies, arranged agencies, and set up Commissions to develop farming and support farmers’ incomes. The real problem is that the recommendations of these commissions and studies are not taken seriously nor implemented fully in their true spirit, but newer studies are commissioned to continue to do good for the farm sector. A glaring example is the Central government’s non implementation of the minimum support price recommendation of M.S. Swaminathan’s National Commission on Farmers (2004) while continually advocating for raising farm incomes.

Alleviating the farm crisis and ensuring farmers’ welfare has been the stated priority of the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana governments; both at the time when they were together as one state and thereafter ~ after 2014. While the united Andhra Pradesh government during YS Rajasekhar Reddy’s time constituted a Farmers’ Welfare Commission under the chairpersonship of Jayathi Ghosh, N.Chandrababu Naidu’s government of the bifurcated Andhra Pradesh in 2014 ap pointed a Commission for the in clu sive and sustainable development of Andhra Pradesh under the chairmanship of R. Radhakrishna which submitted its report in 2016. This seems to have been never seriously examined by the government let alone the implementation of its recommendations.

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This author being a member of its subcommittee on Agriculture Investment, Credit flow and Farmers’ Indebtedness is a witness to the painstaking work of that commission and its comprehensiveness. Now, the Telangana government has appointed another body, Telangana Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Commission for a two-year term under the chairmanship of M. Kodanda Reddy, a senior Congress leader and a person with rich experience in farming and related issues.

If this present commission in Telangana or any other commission that may come up in the country in the future does not want to produce just another report but is serious about its task, it should begin its work with a clear understanding of what the farmer actually needs. It should begin by telling the farmer and other stakeholders what the committee desires to do to meet their aspirations. Specifically, these commissions must first ponder over three basic questions:

1) Who is a farmer? 2) What is farming? and 3) Why should the government support farming? The producers, the food givers to the nation, and the actual tillers of the soil are the farmers. In other words, the small, marginal and tenant farmers are the real farmers who need support. The average size of 146.45 million operational holdings in India was 1.08 hectares as per the agriculture census 2015-16. It has come down to 0.74 (NABARD’s All India Financial Inclusion Survey 2021-22). The small (17.62 per cent) and Marginal Farmers’ (68.54 per cent) share together in total holdings was 86.07 per cent which is estimated to have become 92 per cent by 2021-22.

Besides this, the tenants constitute about 35 to 40 per cent of farming activity although their accurate number is not available for no records are maintained Another noteworthy thing for the Commission is that the number of agricultural laborers has been steeply increasing over the years while the cultivators’ number is coming down drastically. The share of laborers in total agricultural workers has increased from 28.1 in 1951 to 54.9 per cent in 2011 as per the Agriculture Ministry’s statistics 2023 whereas the cultivators’ share has come down from 71.9 to 45.1 per cent over the same period. Does it mean the farmers are losing whatever land they have and becoming farm labourers? Why? These are also the questions the commissions should study and tell us while prescribing the remedies to correct the course. Now what is farming? It comprises several things, not only crop production. Assessing the relative significance of all these components of farming should be among the priority concerns of commissions.

Agriculture and allied sectors contributed 17.4 per cent, at current prices, to the Gross Value Added in 2023-24; that is 0.8 percentile less than the preceding year’s 18.2 per cent share. The share of crop production in this was only 10.1 per cent of GDP. The rest was provided by Livestock (5.5 per cent); Fishing (1.3 per cent) and Forestry (1.3 per cent). So, about half of income accrued from livestock, fishing, and forestry. These activities need their due attention and support. Whatever may be the composition of farming, the farmers’ incomes are pitiably low. The NSS Survey 2019 puts the monthly average of farmers’ family income at Rs 10,695. Of this crop production provides Rs.5,298 and the rest is coming from allied activities. What is imperative is to increase the farmers’ income and increasing it sufficiently from all these sources to retain the farmers in farming for social purpose. Farming needs support for two oft-repeated but compelling reasons: food and employment security in the country.

If the Indian farmer doesn’t feed ab – ove 1,400 million people, who can? The FAO estimates 2,841 million tons of cereals production in 2024, 0.6 per cent less than its earlier expectation. More importantly, the entire food produced in a year sometimes is almost consumed in the same year. For instance, in 2023-24 world cereal production was 2,875 tons against the consumption of 2,843.1 tons, hardly leaving any surplus for future consumption. Food grain production in India that year was 338.29 million tons. About the employment scenario in the country, if the huge labour force is displaced from agriculture because the sector is not able to provide quality employment and decent incomes there is no other sector in the country that can absorb it; 45.76 per cent of the workforce is in agriculture as per 2022-23 government data.

The government has no choice but to protect agriculture and the commissions set up for farmer’s welfare need to look deep into these facts and recommend measures not only to increase the farm production and productivity but the means to increase farm incomes. The new commissions including the one that has already started functioning in Telangana will do well to understand the basics and prepare metadata of the studies and recommendations of all the previous Commissions/bodies on the farm sector.

The Andhra Pradesh government should thoroughly review the Commission it appointed in 2014, the Radhakrishna Commission’s report, and move ahead from that base. The urgent concern of not only the new commissions but of the agriculture departments of the states and Centre should be to thoroughly scrutinize the earlier studies and recommendations and know the farm basics in terms of the need to support farming and farmers. We can again say what Nehru said long back: “Everything can wait, but not agriculture!”.

(The writer is a development economist and commentator on economic and social affairs)