It is amusing to see how city folks are illiterate of farming and farmers, and how eager they are to show the concern and offer solutions. But they will be made to collide with facts every time they hold forth in self-righteous know-all tone. And facts are as under:
1. Indian farming is indeed in a crisis. 2. The crisis is that land holdings are no longer viable. Fragmentation has happened to the extent that great grandson now owns just about 1/20 of what great grandfather owned. 3. In the nineties, minimum support prices were increased without any relation to market, with the result that more areas were brought under cultivation of cash crops. 3. Now, there is glut in case of most produces and prices are crashing. 4. Crashing prices and small landholdings mean profits margins are very thin. Unseasonal rains and failure of rains which were a part of life, and were taken with an innate patience, now may lead to total ruin. 5. No interference by government in the market will solve these problems. They will only get aggravated if government intervenes through insurance, etc. 6. The only solution is industrialization of India, so that population is taken off land, and remaining persons have enough land which is viable to the point of taking vagaries of nature in stride. Just one example- in 1800, 85% of US population was farmers. Now only 1% of US population is farmers. And remaining 99% are not starving or living in slums in cities as a result. They are better fed, better clothed, better housed than anybody else in the world. So much so that 95% of the US poor would not qualify to be poor in any other country on the planet.
Stop learning your economics from Tehelka, Outlook, TOI, HT, NDTV. They are Leftist propaganda houses, not schools of Economics. Nor go to JNU, TISS, and DU either if you are really interested in Economics. They are Leftist brainwashing and indoctrination centres, not centres of learning.
You may begin with Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, move on to Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, and then with The Road To Serfdom By F A Hayek, you would know all that you needed to know about economics.
