The Hindu Business Line : For farm sector, time to go beyond the Budget

The Budget is merely a statement of intent and a work plan. For it to deliver, implementation is the key. Here is where the plan fails, and throwing money at the problem is not going to solve it. Policy-makers must find out if the returns from investments in agriculture are commensurate and tweak plans accordingly. They must also realise that Budgets by themselves will not deliver agriculture from its traditional yoke, says K. P. PRABHAKARAN NAIR.

The ink on the Budget papers has hardly dried and the blame game is already on. The general consensus is that, on agriculture, the Budget has not delivered. Starting from the Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers, the "consensus" is that the Budget sows no seeds for revival of agriculture. Liberal use of the names of Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and their sayings has been taken recourse to, as if to counter the Finance Minister's invoking the sayings of the Tamil saint-poet Tiruvalluvar to emphasise his point.

But what of action? Here the Budget seems to have failed the farm sector. But, then, Nehru, credited with the statement that: "Everything else can wait, but not agriculture", went on to build huge factories, as he was in a hurry to catch up with the Western model for free India. Agriculture remained neglected, till very late in his regime. It was Lal Bahadur Shastri, the simple, but unlucky Prime Minister, who rejuvenated agriculture and left it to Indira Gandhi to take things on from there.

Going to the seed

So much for history; now to turn to current realities. A Budget is a statement of intent and a work plan for the government. Yet, it is not an end in itself. It is for those who handle the proposals to make a success or failure out of these intentions.

It is now an open fact that agriculture has been going to the seed for almost a decade, when India was set on the "growth" trajectory based on "globalisation," a decade after China set out on a similar path with President Deng's prophetic statement: "It is glorious to be rich". Indeed, India is rich by this standard, the only difference being it is confined to a small segment.

And ever since July 2000, when the National Agricultural Policy was thought up — it has remained only on paper — the mandarins in New Delhi have been talking about 4 per cent growth in agriculture. Six years on, while foodgrains production grows at about 1.6 per cent, the population is expanding at around 2 per cent.

To be fair to the Finance Minister, he has included in the Budget a slew of proposals: Allocation for quality seeds in pulses, irrigation schemes, revitalising water bodies to enhance groundwater recharge, short-term crop loans, a special tea fund to prop up the ailing plantation sector, a new `training and visit' programme on the lines of extension network, and so on. But the crucial issue is delivery.

One must ask some very uncomfortable questions. Consider the agricultural set-up. Barring the United States, India has the largest public sector-funded farm infrastructure in the world.

A comparable situation obtains only in Brazil and China. But the comparison stops here. In terms of the investments and what the nation gets in return, China and Brazil have far more to show than India.

Lagging most countries

Take the much-discussed Bt cotton. While we have been crying hoarse about the stranglehold of an MNC, cotton scientists affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences worked quietly and hard for over a decade to bring out their own varieties of Bt cotton to give the MNC a run for its money.

The MNC had to sell its Bt cotton seeds in China for a fraction of the price it sells to Indian farmers. India's scientists are yet to develop a desi Bt cotton.

The same is the case with rice. China is racing ahead with its hybrid rice and we are still talking about the IR varieties of yesteryear.

India set up the first research station in the world for Black Pepper, at Panniyur, in Kannur district of Kerala, in 1953. But after the release of the first "Panniyur 1" variety, in the mid-1960s, nothing worthwhile has happened.

Vietnam, which did not even know how to grow pepper till some years back, has overtaken India in the last two decades.

So also with cardamom. Guatemala, which joined the race in 1970, is ahead of us. Such comparisons are aplenty.

It is time the policy-makers introspected if the nation is getting back in good measure the investments it is making in agriculture.

For instance, despite the huge allocation for irrigation in Budget after Budget, according to the Economic Survey, the area under irrigation for rice, wheat and pulses has hardly increased.

How well is the money spent? Accountability is something Indians have to learn, especially in these times of no free lunches.

It is also time the policy-makers realised that Budgets alone will not deliver everything.

(The author, a former National Science Foundation Professor, Royal Society, Belgium, can be contacted at nair_kpp@yahoo.com)