Agriculture in Madhya Pradesh

Agriculture nightmare in Madhya Pradesh

Sachin Kumar Jain

The production cost of grains, vegetables and fruits has gone up by 350 percent due to the modernization of agriculture. Society could not respond to this increase but now multinationals again have taken over by entering in to retail market. Big companies are now the key players in the open market. It means small vegetable venders have to fight air conditioned showroom of Reliance and Waal mart.
The Madhya Pradesh government has started giving importance to irrigation in its 10th five year plan. The new budget states that in the context of the extreme dependence of our agricultural economy on the monsoons the importance of developing irrigation is clear. In the 10th five year plan under a variety of projects the irrigation capacity is being increased by 0.58 million hectares. In the 9th five year plan the irrigated land area had been increased by 0.096 million hectares, whereas now the government is fixing a target of 0.7 million hectares of additional land to be irrigated. In Madhya Pradesh now 98% of wheat is irrigated, but only 20 % of pulses and 22 % of rice is irrigated.

Size of Land Holdings: A challenge – The total number of land holdings in Madhya Pradesh is 66.37 lacs. And on an average one farmer has 2.5 hectares of farm land. Because of the small size of land holdings the land has not been developed and there is lack of uniformity in the agricultural practices followed.
In 1961-62 farmers in M.P. had an average farm size of 4.1 hectares, which came down to 3.4 hectares in 1981-82 and got reduced further to 2.3 hectares in 1995-96. At the same time 40 % of the farmers had an average farm size of 0.40 hectares. This shows directly that the number of marginal farmers with very small farm sizes is increasing. Results of the seventh round of Rural Labour Survey show that the number of farm laborers with land in 1987 was 49 % and this went up to 57 % in 1999-2000. Analysis shows that because of low production farmers with very small land-holdings are being forced to become laborers.

Farm Land and Production - Of the total fallow land in the country, 19 % lies in Madhya Pradesh. The time period of one crop production in the state varies from 150 to 180 days and at present only 24 % of the farm land is irrigated. Under these circumstances there is a big need to treat the fallow land in the state, since without such treatment we shall only be able to irrigate only 55 % of the land using both the surface and sub-surface water sources. We can also use the principle of community farming for this purpose. One hectare of farm land in Madhya Pradesh produces 1058 kgs of rice, whereas the average rice production per hectare in the country is 2051 kgs. And in the case of wheat the state is 840 kg below the national average.

In the last two decades the state and society has been faced with different forms of water crisis. On the one hand the resources and potential for irrigation have become a matter of existence for farmers. At the same time, looking at the means of irrigation that have been developed, it seems that farmers are giving up surface irrigation. In M.P. in 1960-61 canal irrigation accounted for 48 % and surface irrigation for 61 % of the irrigation. This came down to 29 % and 31 % respectively in 2002-2003 respectively. During the same period the use of ground water for farming went up from 39 % to 69 %. Only 27% of total agricultural land is irrigated and still agriculture is a gamble of monsoon for farmers in Madhya Pradesh. So now Madhya Pradesh is a state facing most serious salinity, fluoride and nitrate problem in the ground water.
As now seeds and fertilizers have become a commodity of the global market so farmers have lost their control and knowledge about it. In last three years low quality seeds and duplicate seeds have vanished life of thousands of farmers. This new developing phenomenon has taken live of 2 farmers in 2006-07. It is just a beginning. One of the senior ministers of Madhya Pradesh Government made very serious negative remarks in the assembly on 25th July 2007 about the intensions of the farmers as electricity power consumers regarding payment of bills, which clearly sounds that State have no faith in the farmers. Moving forward to for analyzing the degree of protection farmers have, it alarming that in Madhya Pradesh farmers have been compensated by Rs 1.00 against the loss of R. 7.00 due to natural calamity, diseases or low quality seeds sold in the market. The indicators show that on the one side farmers will have no more protection from the state and on the other side they will have to face multinational companies entering in to the production and retail sector. We can observe some important points from studying the development process in post-independence India. One of them is that in our country the potential and sources of development have not been distributed evenly. Some sections of the society have gained more and others have gained much less. After 60 years of independence sense of inequality is getting new shape.