Grain of Success
Madhya Pradesh has witnessed an agricultural boom, and is swiftly becoming India’s rice bowl
An agricultural boom has turned the state into India’s rice bowl and a prime producer of wheat and pulses
Every day, at the crack of dawn, Sohail Khan, a progressive farmer from Chittora village in the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh (MP), sets out on his tractor for his paddy fields, wading through the slush created by a surplus monsoon. For the past five years, ever since branded rice companies began making their way to this area to buy produce, Khan has sown rice paddy and reaped the benefits. Khan’s agricultural arsenal includes tractors, heavy-duty hydraulic trolleys, ploughs, drills and sprays, all well maintained and self funded from his farm income. Khan’s pride in his farm, his work and his achievements is palpable: “Even if I had a choice, I wouldn’t do anything else by way of a profession,” he says. At work, Khan oversees the manual weeding process and spraying of pesticides, making sure that not a single furrow is overlooked by the hired labour. It is, after all, his gold. He will return home only around sunset, tired but pleased at the prospect of a bumper crop some months from now.
Madhya Pradesh clocked more than 20 per cent growth in 2014-15 over the previous year. It has come a long way from the (-)4.7 per cent recorded in 2004-05, and in the process won the Union government’s Krishi Karman award, for the highest growth in food production, for four years on the trot. Agricultural production has doubled in the past 10 years, and MP is now the second largest producer of wheat from being the fourth largest some years ago. The numbers are even more impressive when one takes into account the fact that agricultural output in the country grew at a paltry 1.1 per cent in 2014-15, and that the farm sector’s contribution to the GDP is constantly declining.
MP’s chief minister, Shivraj Singh
Chouhan, who occupied the state’s top political office while this turnaround took place, has a direct connect with this issue. He is known to visit his farm at Bais village in Vidisha district, about 60 km from state capital Bhopal, two to three times a month. There, in consultation with caretakers, he oversees his pomegranate plantation and poly house—a kind of greenhouse—in which Gerbera daisies are grown, and keeps tabs on how his flowers fare at the market. Having already used the ‘kisan putra’ tag to his advantage in his political career, CM Chouhan often holds forth these days as a kisan himself—one of the 9.88 million farmers in the state—speaking at numerous public meetings on the virtues of adopting progressive agricultural practices over traditional ones to make farming remunerative. However, to lay all the credit for this turnaround at one man’s door would be simplistic. There are many factors that have contributed to the resurgence in MP’s agricultural fortunes, and one of them is the enterprise of the farmers themselves.
Rewind to year 2005. Soyabean cultivation, once hailed as a sure route to prosperity for MP’s farmers, had become mired in macro-level issues such as low exports, erratic rainfall, and increasingly problematic pestcontrol. The initial success with soyabean cultivation from the ’80s onward had ushered in a wave of mechanisation and rural prosperity. But by 2005, returns on that crop had plummeted, and farmers were looking for the next big thing. It was then that they began to consider the cultivation of ‘basmati’ paddy as a viable alternative. (MP is currently fighting a legal battle to allow its rice crop to be certified as ‘Basmati’, which is a geographical tag, just as ‘Darjeeling’ is for tea and ‘Champagne’ is for sparkling wine. At present, MP’s rice crop has not been granted that distinction.)
Paddy of the traditional kind has been cultivated for long in the
eastern and northern parts of the state. However, the central Narmada region, including the districts of Raisen, Hoshangabad, Narsinghpur and Harda—of late, the most prosperous areas for agriculture in MP— took to rice cultivation in a big way, preparing the ground for a transformation. Today, produce is being procured from farmers of this region by numerous branded rice companies, mainly for export. While procurement prices depend on global factors, the crop has offered unprecedentedly high returns—as much as Rs 4,500 a quintal, or Rs 90,000 per acre—which is six times more than soyabean. The introduction of long grain rice, such as Basmati, has ensured a productivity increase from 6.6 quintals per hectare in 2002-03 to 24.5 quintals per hectare in 2014-15.
Dharmendra Chauhan, a farmer in the Bai tehsil of Raisen district, narrates a story to illustrate the booming prosperity. “One night, a few years ago, a farmer from a neighbouring village came to my house on his way back from the mandi, after selling his crop. He said he didn’t want to carry a gunny bag he was holding at that hour, and wanted to leave it with me. I casually told him to keep it in the shed, asking him what it contained. When he told me it was cash from the sale of 600 quintals of paddy, I could barely believe my ears. I offered to keep the bag safely inside the house,” says Chauhan.
Soon, companies manufacturing consumer goods were scouting the area to tap its disposable wealth. “There was a consistently high growth, of about 30 per cent, in the sales of SUVs on either side of the Narmada, in Raisen and Hoshangabad district, for about three years. It was mainly possible after farmers took to cultivation of rice in the area. Growth was recorded in sales in all areas, except Bundelkhand, where sales were sluggish. A similar jump was seen in tractor sales as well,” says Virendra Singh of Win Win automobiles, a Mahindra dealership in the area.
This success would not have been possible without some key interventions on the part of the state
BASMATI RICE CULTIVATION HAS OFFERED FABULOUS RETURNS—AS MUCH AS Rs 4,500 A QUINTAL, OR Rs 90,000 PER ACRE
government. Ensuring the availability of water for irrigation was one such. The implementation of already-announced irrigation projects was speeded up, and a restructuring of the water sector also took place, thanks to aid from the World Bank. The rural development department also contributed to this increase in productivity, via schemes such as Kapil Dhara, under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS). The increased availability of certified seeds was another such state government intervention. There has been an almost ninefold increase in availability of certified seeds over the past 20 years, which was considered a key driver of growth. In a similar vein, the shortage of fertilisers was an enduring theme in MP’s agriculture cycle till about five years ago. Administrative interventions such as advance stock building have helped increase the amount available for use by farmers.
Mechanisation has been on a steady rise too. There has been a threefold increase in tractor sales in the past 10 years, which is partly due to the easy credit available to farmers for the purpose. Two hundred villages have been developed as yantradoot gram (mechanised villages), where
output increases in agriculture have been recorded in third-party evaluations. However, naysayers point to the fact that the surge in tractor sales corresponded with the infrastructure boom in the country, and especially the spike in road construction in rural areas under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY). The investment in tractors during this period, they say, was indirectly subsidised by the high demand for rental earthmovers by road contractors. Nonetheless, the availability of tractors seems to have helped bring a larger area under cultivation in the state.
Another factor contributing to the increased production is the availability of power for agricultural use. This has been a contentious issue in MP for quite some time now—power availability was the ‘B’ in ‘BSP’, or ‘bijli, sadak, paani’, the issue successfully invoked by the BJP in the 2003 assembly elections to oust the Congress. In 2008-09, the availability of power for pumps stood at 0.80 Kilowatts (Kw) per hectare. By 2013-14, that number had increased to 1.36 Kw per hectare. Currently, about 16.1 billion units of power is being supplied to the agriculture sector, up from 6.7 billion units in 2009-10.
One of the most striking incentives offered by the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government has been farm credit at zero per cent interest, available since 2012-13. In the past, farm loans were given at 5 per cent interest. The waiving of interest not only ensures that farmers buy fertilisers and seeds on credit, but also leaves them with cash in hand for other expenses. “There are about 2.8 million farmers in MP in the credit net,” says cooperatives minister Vishwas Sarang. “We plan to increase this number to 3.8 million in the next two years. A total amount of about Rs 13,500 is disbursed as credit to each farmer through state government cooperative banks at zero per cent interest in a given year.”
In a bid to keep up the tempo, the state government has decided to focus on soil health, to determine what kind of fertilisers need to be supplied. Soil health cards are to be issued to 10.7 million farmers, and to better predict seasonal changes, 1,200 automated weather stations and 33,000 rain gauges will be placed across the state. There is also a focus on the use of customised farming equipment as this will promote mechanisation. Another focus area will be to bring more area under cultivation for the ‘third crop cycle’ in the summer months; currently, this stands at 3.6 lakh hectares. The state government has also adopted the target of doubling farm incomes in the next five years. The critics, however, point to an interesting statistic that mars the MP story. The 2001 census put the number of farmers in the state at 11 million, but as per the 2011 census, there were only 9.88 million farmers. In other words, there was a net drop of 1.12 million in the number of farmers in these ten years. If farming in MP was so profitable, ask some, why would this happen? Moreover, in 2001, there were 7 million people working as agriculture labour; this increased to 12.2 million in 2011. Do these numbers suggest that farmers have been becoming labour on their own lands, or did the increase in labour supply come from somewhere else?