Crisis of Agricultural in Uttar Pradesh: From Apprehension to Actuality

Abstract

The Indian countryside where the large majority of its people reside is in the grip of a severe crisis relating to agriculture. The rural India is in acute distress- there is not enough work, not enough food to eat and not enough water to drink for the rural population_.Dipankar Gupta (2005) seems brutally correct when he writes, “Agriculture (in India) today is an economic residue that generously accommodates non-achievers resigned to a life of sad satisfaction. The villager is as bloodless as the rural economy is lifeless. From rich to poor the trend is to leave the village…..”The situation looks extremely grim as we are in a situation where painkillers are adding to the pains and the medicines are aggravating the disease.  Government’s efforts of coming out of the quagmire are actually pushing agriculture further dipper and dipper into it.Manifestations of agrarian distress in contemporary India is not confined to the pockets of backwardness; even the regions having a high degree of commercial agriculture, using relatively better technology and having a relatively diversified cropping pattern have reported high indebtedness and distress of various kinds. While the perilous form of the crisis as reflected in form of farmer’s distress and suicide is visible at present mainly in states like Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra (especially Vidarbha) and Kerala etc.; the preliminary signs of a brewing crisis is discernible also in the North Indian states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. The crisis of agriculture in Uttar Pradesh has not reached an acute stage but it is a lingering crisis of low intensity reflected in stagnation in production, farmer’s indebtedness, poor returns to cultivation, and growing discontent of the farmers and alienation The literature on the nature and magnitude of crisis of agriculture of the type Uttar Pradesh is in, is rather sparse; while policy makers are not keen to even accept that something is wrong with agriculture in UP, the economists are too obsessed and occupied with the severe form of crisis existing elsewhere to pay any heed to it. The primary contention of the present write up is twofold- first, to conceptualise crisis of agriculture in order to see whether it is crisis of the agricultural sector or that of the agriculturists and second, to draw forth the point that the apprehension of a brewing crisis in UP is not false. If corrective measures are not taken at the earliest there is every likelihood that the apprehension of a major crisis of agriculture in the state would turn into actuality. The paper is organized in three sections. Section-I explicates the concept of the crisis taking help of relevant literature, Section-II briefly discusses the methodology of measurement of crisis of agriculture. Section-III presents a summary picture of UP agriculture and develops a composite index of crisis of agriculture for UP and some other states and the final section i.e. Section-IV suggests some interventions required to put the cart on track.