2023-04-28 04:00:01
But Dhande, 24, has not let this misfortune dent his belief that he is in the right profession. “There are tremendous prospects for farming in this country, in this place, if only God is with us,” he insists.
Farming occupies an outsize role in the Indian economy. It generates nearly a fifth of GDP, and regarding 45 per cent of the population live on farms. Farming employs more Indians than any other sector.
Punjab, India’s largest and richest farming area, was an early beneficiary of the “green revolution” from the 1960s onwards, when swaths of the state were planted intensively with rice and wheat, two crops that benefit from a government-subsidised price.
Many larger landholders from Punjab have lucrative businesses. Still, this is a state people often choose to leave: younger brothers who miss out on a family land inheritance, for example, or people joining families who have emigrated to Canada, the UK or the US. Roadsides often display advertisements for visa services and test prep for English as a second language.
In 2019, the government pursued plans for agricultural reform that would have removed subsidies from crops. Angry farmers from Punjab and Haryana to the south rode their tractors down to the capital, blocking New Delhi to demonstrate once morest the reforms. After weeks of at times violent protests, the Modi government overturned its plans, a rare setback for a popular prime minister.
Apart from the looming march of market forces, Punjab’s farming model is also under growing threat from environmental blight and climate change. Rice and wheat depend heavily on water, but overfarming has caused the water table to go down. Farmers also burn the stubble from their crops in winter, contributing to the smog that blankets India’s northern plains and hindering natural regeneration of the soil, meaning farmers need to rely more heavily on chemicals to grow their crops.
And as this year’s unseasonal weather showed, unpredictable climatic patterns are already hobbling one of the main ways Indians feed themselves. “Because of the frequent weather changes, we are facing problems growing wheat now,” Dhandhe says.
The challenges hanging over agriculture are central to India’s future. “We are the most populous country surpassing China, and everybody has a mouth and a stomach to fill,” says Ashok Gulati, distinguished professor at the Indian Council for Research on Economic Relations. “So question number one is, can we feed ourselves?”
On this front, the numbers look encouraging: India, once plagued by famine, has more recently managed to remain self-sufficient in most food categories except edible oils, and been the world’s largest rice exporter. Even during Covid, when the Modi government distributed free food to nearly 800m people, buffer stocks ran down but not out.
However, the decline of the breadbasket of Punjab, with its depleting water and deteriorating soil, suggests a bleaker outlook for Indian farming.“There is a mess on the environmental front, which raises issues of sustainable agriculture,” says Gulati. “On top of that you put climate change, and you have to ask: is our agriculture climate resilient?”
Dhande has been studying Facebook pages on how to farm the land more effectively, and soaking up knowledge from elders who have been tilling the soil for longer. He is committed to staying in India, but says that many other young people like himself are going abroad because there will be “just nothing here to do” if farming doesn’t remain profitable. If the government does not continue to support prices, he says, “Farming will be left at the mercy of God.”
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