Unfinished Land Reforms and Fragile Agriculture

Fractured policies coupled with half-baked reforms accentuate agony of farmers, especially share-croppers who are not even entitled to calamity claim relief. Holistic approach needed to ramp up agri productivity, writes Taradatt.

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LAND, recognised through the ages as an existential resource, holds the key to delivering productivity-linked growth to Bharat's agricultural and allied sectors. In fact, for healthy development of any sector intrinsically embedded in land, land reforms in sync with the demands of time are critically-important.

Nowadays, economic operators are confronted by a globally-integrated but lopsided agricultural market, and a world of commerce intertwined through bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral agreements. Protection of national interests by denying market access to agricultural produce, coupled with mind-numbing subsidies to own large-scale farming, is giving heft to demands for export opportunities elsewhere by powerful countries.

In this scenario, our agriculture could never take meaningful strides towards achieving its true growth potential, nor could the hands of peasantry be strengthened, without land reforms, untangling the complexities of customary practices, and undertaking concomitant changes in policies.

Yet, blinkered and fractured populist shortcuts have found easy favour with our polity fragmented along Central and State imperatives. Hardly surprising, comprehensive farm laws are rebuffed and rescinded. The gulf between theory and practice of governmental policies remains unabridged. Consequently, efficiency and competitiveness become a casualty.

The only option before India's agriculture is ‘Reform and Perform or Perish’.