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    Agriculture Is India’s Ray of Hope in Time of Crisis

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    As India completes 73 years of independence, agriculture has emerged as a mainstay of the economy. Despite the COVID-19 crisis, Indian agriculture is poised to grow by an estimated 3% in 2020-21. Shaktikanta Das, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has acknowledged that agriculture remains a “beacon of hope” at a time the economy is shrinking.

    The government has announced a new agricultural policy that has drawn both supporters and detractors. Farmer protests have broken out in parts of the country. About 50,000 have marched to New Delhi from the agrarian state of Punjab, objecting to the loosening of price, storage and sales regulations that have traditionally shielded India’s farmers from the free market forces.

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    As of August 25, the International Monetary Fund projected India’s real GDP growth to be 4.5% in 2020. This shrinking of the economy in a country with a growing population could lead to a major crisis. Already, jobs are scarce, industrial production has declined, services have suffered and demand has plummeted. Even after decades of independence, agriculture remains “the largest source of livelihoods in India.” As India gears up to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s 151st birthday, there is no better time than now to achieve the Gandhian vision of rural self-reliance.

    Blessing in Disguise

    COVID-19 has made rural areas more important than ever. On March 25, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown. It took the country by surprise. Millions of urban migrant workers were left with little choice but to walk home to their villages. Carrying their meager household possessions and with their small children in tow, many walked hundreds of kilometers, suffering thirst, hunger and pain. Some died en route.

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    India’s Economic Survey 2016-17 estimated the “annual inter-state migration [to be] about 5-6.5 million between 2001 and 2011.” In 2020, this migration has been reversed. People who fled rural areas for urban jobs have returned home. Chinmay Tumbe, a professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and an expert on migration, estimates that 30 million migrants might have returned to their villages since the lockdown began. The number could be as high as 70-80 million if reverse intrastate migration is accounted for.

    The reverse migration from urban to rural areas might be a blessing in disguise. Over the last few decades, urban migration has led to overcrowding of cities, the proliferation of slums and much misery for poor migrants. In cities, they have lacked community, cultural moorings and social safety nets. The massive migration to India’s cities was a result of failed economic policies that focused on megacities while neglecting villages. Several studies have found that at least 60% to 70% of the migrant workers who returned to their native places are unlikely to return back to the cities, at least not in the near future. The millions of migrant workers, whom I refer to as agricultural refugees, flocked to cities because the government’s economic policies kept them impoverished.

    A recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in collaboration with ICRIER, a New Delhi-based think tank, concluded that Indian farmers suffered a cumulative loss of Rs. 45 lakh crore (over $600 billion) between 2000 and 2016-17 because of such policies. Subsequently, the NITI Aayog, a policy think tank of the government of India, admitted that, between 2011-12 and 2015-16, the growth in real farm incomes was less than 0.5% every year. It was 0.44% to be exact.

    Since then, the growth in real farm incomes has been near zero. With farm incomes growing painfully slowly and then stagnating, what else could be expected from the rural workforce but migration to cities where menial jobs as daily wage workers give many the only shot at survival?

    Despite the Hardships

    Despite these hardships, Indian farmers have toiled hard to produce a bumper harvest year after year. This has led to overflowing food stocks. Reports show that this abundance of food grains has come in handy. The government has been able to provide subsidized rations to over 720 million people during the four months of the post-COVID-19 lockdown. In addition, the government has been able to provide free rations to the needy.

    A buoyant agricultural output has hidden a severe agrarian crisis. Farmers get little money for their produce. With less money available in their hands, rural demand has dipped. This had led to a slowdown in the Indian economy even prior to the lockdown. In a country where the agricultural workforce accounts for nearly 50% of the population, the surest way to bolster the economy is to create more rural demand. This involves providing farmers with decent incomes.   

    The lockdown has increased downward pressure on farm incomes. It coincided with the rabi (winter crop) harvest season and resulted in a crash in demand for winter produce. Farmers suffered huge losses in the case of perishables such as vegetables, fruits, flowers, poultry, dairy and fish. Not all news is grim though. On May 15, the United States Department of Agriculture estimated that India is on course to produce “a record 295.7 million metric tons, with estimated record rice, wheat and corn production.”

    For the next kharif (monsoon crop) season, the sowing area coverage of summer crops has increased by 13.92% as compared to last year. With rains expected to be normal, and with a much higher area under cultivation, the kharif harvest will be bountiful just like the rabi one. It seems that in these times of crisis, agriculture alone provides a ray of hope in India.

    Aim for an Economic New Normal

    The coronavirus pandemic has come as a timely reminder of the limitations of dominant economic thinking. Its inherent bias and blind spots stand exposed. For the last two centuries and more, economics has sacrificed agriculture on the altar of industry. The dominant assumption is that industry drives productivity and growth.

    India has never quite managed to industrialize like, for example, the US or China. Still, it has kept farm incomes low and neglected public investment in agriculture for many decades. As per the RBI, this investment hovered around 0.4% of the GDP between 2011-12 and 2017-18. It is little surprise that agriculture has floundered in India.

    The time has come to change outdated economic thinking. Agriculture matters to India because it employs a majority of the country’s population. It provides food security to 1.3 billion people whose ancestors suffered repeated famines until a few decades ago. COVID-19 gives the country the opportunity to return not to normal, but to a new normal.

    The return of migrant labor to villages gives India the opportunity to reinvigorate its rural economy. The country must tap the socioeconomic wealth of rural enterprise, its diversity, and the traditional knowledge base. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat — a self-reliant India — can only be achieved through a focus on agriculture. A sharp focus, sensible policies and public investment can unleash growth not only in the sector but also in the country.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      A Year On, the Clean India Mission Falls Short

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      Research amidst the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the virus is transmitted through wastewater. This makes it crucial to revisit the goals of India’s ambitious Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission, or SBM) that came to a close almost exactly a year ago. While there were substantial improvements made in toilet coverage, a lack of data clarity muddies an understanding of exactly how large these improvements were across the country. According to government estimates, national sanitation coverage was 51% in 2014 when SBM began and reached 78% in 2018, less than a year prior to the end of the program. While this certainly shows progress — the national average was just under 26% in 1999 — no one would think to take these numbers and simply round up to 100%.  

      But at the close of the SBM last fall, this is exactly what Prime Minister Narendra Modi did. Speaking to a crowd, Modi proclaimed that India was now completely open defecation free (ODF), with sanitation coverage reported by the SBM portal as 100% in rural areas and, inexplicably, 105% in urban areas. From the start of the 2014 campaign, the central government maintained that in just five short years, India would be ODF. Despite the gains made, a singular focus on meeting steep targets in a very short amount of time seems to have put Modi in a tight spot by the time October 2019 rolled around. 

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      The gaps have been, at times, glaring. News reports from established outlets all over the country reported open defecation in areas that were already recorded as ODF. A 2018 study by the Rice Institute estimated an open defecation rate of 44%, meaning nearly half of the sampled population was still engaging in the practice hardly a year before SBM ended. In urban areas the picture looks a bit better: 95% of urban households access an improved toilet. But this includes community toilets, which may be used by hundreds of other families and are often plagued with maintenance, hygiene and safety issues. Furthermore, one survey from 18 states identified over 48,000 manual scavengers still cleaning “dry” toilets which do not discharge into sewer lines.

      Social Pressure-Cooker

      What explains these inconsistencies? The use of shame-based tactics to stop open defecation, alongside a rush to meet ODF goals, have built up a pressure-cooker environment. The SBM has continued prior national efforts that deemphasized technical solutions and focused heavily on strategies to encourage behavior change at the local level. One such strategy is Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), which hinges on “triggering” disgust and extreme emotions among community members to spur the abandonment of open defecation. Despite some concerns about shame-based approaches, the SBM continued with the CLTS Foundation and others as implementation partners.

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      But open defecation is an issue that needs more than short-term emotional reactions. The longstanding practice is mired in cultural tradition, casteist taboos and environmental factors, among others. Some reasons people give for it is that they do not wish to empty a pit themselves, that it is considered more hygienic to defecate further away from the home — certainly reasonable considering how few poor Indian homes have running water — or that community toilets are dirty and unsafe, so squatting in a quiet area nearby is actually preferable.

      In the SBM environment, people who have not built a toilet, for whatever reason, are highly likely to experience retaliation for continuing to defecate in the open. Because Indian culture is quite collective — the actions of one person are seen to have radiating effects on the family and community — sometimes social pressure can play a role in nudging behavior change. However, this is a slippery slope. In India’s highly unequal society, characterized by stark gender and caste-based hierarchies amidst a wide array of languages and ethnicities, such strategies have the potential to be misused, with large social costs.

      There is ample evidence to show this. In June 2017, Zafar Hussein, a local community leader agitating against the eviction of his settlement in Rajasthan, was allegedly beaten to death by local officials for trying to stop officials from taking photographs of women defecating in the open. His death was reported by multiple outlets. In other areas of Maharashtra, people have been followed by a loud band, jailed or fined for defecating in the open.

      Walls of shame have been instituted by local village councils onto which the names and photographs of people defecating openly are be pasted. These individuals were often removed from eligibility for local government programs. The previously mentioned Rice Institute study also recorded coercion and threats of the loss of government rations as a way to bring down open defecation rates. Notably, the study found that Dalits and Adivasis were the most likely to face such behaviors. India’s Health Ministry has publicly denounced the results of the Rice survey. But in September last year, weeks before Modi’s ODF declaration, two young Dalit children were beaten to death in their village in Madhya Pradesh for defecating in the open.

      Numbers, Strategies and Health Equity

      These debates over sanitation data are not merely academic exercises. They have real, material impacts on people. In some ways, the above tragedies are not surprising. If a hasty approach is taken toward declaring areas ODF, it follows that any activity hinting that this claim is not matched by reality will be quashed. Despite this, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation bestowed the Global Goalkeeper Award upon Modi last year. It is surprising that one of the largest, most influential health organizations in the world, committed to facts and data, accepted without question the Indian prime minister’s claims, failing to consider all the evidence to the contrary.

      So what is the solution? Certainly, the answer is not to give up on sanitation programming as the need remains great. There are several organizations on the ground that have successfully integrated mobilization with communities, technical expertise and a sustained presence through which people are not merely pressured to stop a practice but meaningfully guided toward an alternative and given the facts and tools to integrate that alternative into their lives.

      However, this takes a more long-term presence, a less single-minded focus on quick targets, a commitment toward waste management infrastructure besides just toilets, and a willingness to meet people where they are. Further, the same people who have fallen through the gaps in the SBM are those with a lot to lose during the current pandemic: the rural poor, slum-dwellers, sanitation workers, manual laborers and migrants. Brutal crackdowns against those who kept working amidst India’s COVID-19 lockdown illustrate that retaliation cannot continue to be a solution when reality does not match the official word. Amidst the pandemic, sanitation infrastructure and the transparency of data surrounding it are necessities that cannot afford to wait.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More