Indian Agriculture system: Major issues and problems

Recently, farmer agitation and protests regarding agricultural loan waiver have sparked a political debate all over the country. All this happened after UP's CM Mr. Yogi announced to waive off agricultural loans worth 36,359 crores.
The phenomenon of farmer's distress and agitation is not new, to understand this we must have knowledge about features of agriculture system--

Here we provide salient features and problems associated with Indian agriculture and production --

1. India ranks second world wide in farm output or production, obviously number one is China.
2. India holds second largest agricultural land in world, first one being USA.
3. Agriculture along with forestry and fisheries contribute around 17% of India's GDP.
4. 49% of Indian workforce is indulged in agricultural works, in other words we can say it provides employment to half working population of India.
5. India is one of the largest exporter of agricultural/horticultural and processed foods. Products are exported to more than 120 countries. India is world's largest producer of milk, major spices, jute etc. Also one of rhe largest producer of rice and wheat.
6. India also produces a lage number of organic agricultural products. Actually organic methods of farming leads back to indus valley civilization and even before that.
7. Indian agriculture is diverse. This diversity is present due to complex demogrphy and diverse ecosystem of India.

Apart from these India's  agricultural sector suffers from various drawbacks as listed here--

1. In our country around 49% people are associated with agricultural activities, yet this sector contributes only around 13 to 14% of total GDP.Now this should clear doubts about why per capita income in agriculture sector is low as compared to other fields.
2. India has one of the largest agricultural land but due to population density most of the land is fragmented, or we can say it is divided into small parts which leads to inefficiency of production.
3. Indian production (agricultural)  is neither market driven nor fully government controlled, hence wages of farmers are always uncertain.
4. Lack of suitable marketing system and inefficient chain of traders further contribute to lower prices for farm products.
5. Lack of infrastructure like cold storage, transpot etc. is responsible for world's highest crop spoilage rates in India.
6. India is way behind from developed countries technologically, in pacaging, processing and farming productivity. And this leads to income loss to producers.
7. Lack of proper irrigation system increses our dependability on nature and monsoons. It increses risks and losses of input cost to the farming.
8. Cases of farmer's suicide are not new in India. And it haapens mostly due to agrarian crisis( concept of agrarian crisis is explained in next article).

All these factors have resulted in lower economic status of people associated with farming work. Mainly small scale & medium scale farmers are victim of it.

Almost half of India's population is indulged in agricultural works and most of them are below poverty line, means that agricultural work is not yielding benefits to them economically. Less income results in poverty and less consumer capacity, which is harmful for economy and society.

For more details regarding all possible solutions to this problem & initiatives taken by government, check out our next article.