Farming Crisis in India: Causes, Consequences and Remedies

Commerce

Despite growing migration to cities in the past two decades, of the 121 crore Indians, 83.3 crore live in rural areas while 37.7 crore stay in urban areas, said the Census of India’s 2011.It has been a season of agrarian discontent in India and farmers across various state s have regularly been holding demonstrations over the past year, pressing the government to offer them more help. The situation exposes the precarious state in which the country's struggling farmers and impoverished landless agricultural laborers currently find themselves in distress. There are number of conflicting reasons for agrarian crisis, such as monsoon failure, high debt burdens, genetically modified crops, government policies, public mental health, personal issues and family problems farmers indebtedness and bankruptcy and farms regarding issues i.e. fragmentation and subdivision of land holdings. Experts say many farm commodities are trading below support prices set by the authorities, because the government only commits serious sums to buying wheat and rice, but not other crops. Agriculture, especially in the context of India, constitutes the back bone of the whole economic system. It provides employment opportunities to more than 50 per cent of the total workforce in India and contributes around 17-18 percent to the country’s GDP in addition provides necessary inputs for high industrial growth. It also supplies fodder for India’s huge livestock and has become major way to earn foreign currency. Therefore, required attention in the form of realistic policy measures such as timely availability of formal credit and other inputs to the farmers, creating the awareness about policies and programs of the government meant for educating the farmers through different media platforms is the need of hour on the part of the Indian government. Agricultural growth can be seen as an enabler of the overall economic growth of India.

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