Abstract
The crisis in Indian agriculture, which has been building up for decades, is not one of declining profitability, but a more basic one of the bulk of its holdings being non-viable. Not only the number of these holdings, but even the extent of non-viable land in the total area is fast increasing and will dominate agriculture unless the trend is reversed. Merely increasing the productivity of small holdings has not helped much. Non-viability comes in the way of capital formation in agriculture and its dynamic growth. The main culprit behind this situation is that employment opportunities in non-agricultural sectors are not growing fast enough. In an international perspective, Indian situation is among the worst. It needs urgent attention. A number of steps are suggested.
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Acknowledgements
This was delivered as the 15 Prof. L S Venkataramanan Memorial Lecture at the ISEC, Bengaluru, on 14 February 2017. Thanks are due to Dr Khalil Shah of ISEC for promptly providing whatever data I requested. A modified version of this lecture was later published in the Economic and Political Weekly ,Vol 53(17), 28th April 2018, pp. 28-34. We thank EPW for permitting us to publish the lecture in the Journal of Social and Economic Development.
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L.S. Venkataramanan Memorial Lecture; This lecture was delivered by Prof. M V Nadkarni at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore (ISEC) as LSV Memorial Lecture on February 14, 2017. The article was submitted to ISEC on that occasion for possible publication and circulation. This lecture is presented here in its original version.
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Nadkarni, M.V. Crisis in Indian agriculture: can it be overcome?. J. Soc. Econ. Dev. 24 (Suppl 1), 228–241 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40847-022-00202-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40847-022-00202-3