Why
We see numerous debates around topics like attracting youth towards agriculture, politics, environmentalism, coding, etc. To make these debates more meaningful and pertinent to the goal, we have to clearly spell out the intention behind the proposal.
Once upon a time, when higher education was becoming more accessible, resulting in rural to urban migration in search of better paying jobs, the question of attracting youth to agriculture would have had a different meaning. We were perhaps anxious about the loss of manpower or diversion of labour. We wanted young men in place of retiring ones to do the same labour intensive farming, with hardly any change in successive generations’ ability to add value to the process, due to stagnant technology.
However, the current thinking with regard to the question of attracting youth towards agriculture is in the direction of benefiting from the potential of youth to add more value to the agricultural processes than what the preceding generation could do. This expectation is because of the rapid pace of technological advancement that we are currently witnessing – which cannot be regarded to be an isolated phenomenon. Let me explain this elaborately.
Its tech and tech everywhere
Any product is composed of a mix of 3 major functional ingredients – Labour, Capital, and Technology. In a primitive system of economy (Eg: Stone age), production of one unit of any product would have been more labour intensive, with very less use of costly (Capital) and sophisticated machinery (Technology). As time progressed, one thing logically led to another. Today, here we are at the cusp of 4th industrial revolution.
This is no ordinary feat. Please have a look at this image, which is a highly simplified form, yet sufficient to appreciate the significance of technological progress.
With every stage of technological progress shown above, the processes that went into the manufacture of one unit of any product saw drastic change in the sense that it became more capital intensive and less labour intensive.
We are rapidly moving from muscle power to knowledge power. Needless to say that knowledge based jobs (coding, practice of law, scientific research, etc) are highly productive and are hence high paying, in comparison to purely muscle power jobs (janitor, construction worker, etc).
Today, we take for granted, things like Fire, Wheel, Language, Electricity, and Internet. If you think that all these became possible because they were merely the logical conclusion of their respective predecessor technologies, then the modernization of agriculture, armed with extensive use of implements of 4th industrial revolution like AI, Bigdata, Robotics, IoT, Quantum computing, 3D Printing, Nano technology – must be the inevitable logical conclusion.
Its story time now. Let me narrate a short one for you.
I am taking you to 7500 BC, a Neolithic civilization at Mesopotamia in the banks of River Tigris, modern day Iraq. Our species was experiencing sedentary lifestyle for the first ever time. The thawing of the last ice age was the main reason that helped man invent many things (mainly agriculture).
The invention of wheel led to a revolution in the real sense. Wheel was extensively used back then for pot making, transporting things, running spindles among others. Suppose that there was a community of persons involved in the vocation of facilitating irrigation. It either didn’t occur to their mind or they deliberately intended to keep away from it, this community didn’t use pulleys or wheels or cylindrical logs to help their task of fetching water from well. In simple terms, they relied on pure linear motion and didn’t use rotational motion in any kind.
It seemed pure magic to their eyes to see what other artisans or workmen did to move heavy objects with so much ease. This community, by virtue of its slow work, could hardly earn any surplus to trade it for other commodities. Their standard of living could hardly keep up with the rest of the population.
The other sectors that made use of wheel, were really becoming more efficient. For making every unit of their produce (like pots), the use of wheel made their process less labour intensive and commensurately more capital intensive. They could earn more, secure a better lifestyle and more leisure time to spend on painting, dancing, etc.
The increase in productivity gap between those who embraced the wheel and those who didn’t, reflected directly in the income gap, resulting in more economic inequality.
In our context, to make Indian agriculture more remunerative as well as to reduce the income/wealth gap between farmers and others, the only way is to embrace technology.
The inglorious gap and the way forward
With scientific advancement in any field, there would likely be a potential for application in another field. Why telegraph lines were originally laid? And what is internet helping us with today? Here is a more relevant analogy. The Forest Survey of India publishes a biennial report titled "India State of Forest Report", containing information of changes in green cover across the country. The primary data source for the spatial information given in the report is based on interpretation of data from Indian Remote Sensing satellite data (to be precise, Resourcesat-II). The satellite imagery is basically subjected to image processing algorithms to finally arrive at data driven conclusions like increase / decrease of forest cover, for each type of forest and for each state separately. How did we know that we can apply image processing algorithms for studying forest cover? This would have given you a perspective that I am trying to convey. We must make use of the new age computational tools to run our agriculture to take it to higher levels of value chain. This cannot happen unless we expose and encourage youth, who have appetite for learning and experimentation, as well as the technical potential that I am talking about. It must not be a case that only a farmer's son becomes a farmer. The problems facing agriculture are multi-dimensional involving diverse areas like the question of nutrition security, impact of climate change, value addition through food processing, urgent need to increase yield and so on. So, must be the problem solving approach too.
It has rightly been told, Reform that you may preserve! The choice of whether we want a honourable place in history or we want to be forgotten is entirely ours. This is the time for action.
An economic system that rewards an individual who identifies this potential “gap” is called free market capitalism. This individual, who goes on to assume capital risk and pools the relevant technology and manpower is called an entrepreneur. Now, India needs agro entrepreneurs. India needs youth who are capable of applying their talent in high-tech areas to solve the problems of agriculture. There are a few startups that have developed IoT (Internet of things) tools to monitor individual crop for pest, soil moisture, temperature on a continuous basis to help make early decisions and sustain a high yield, than otherwise. Hence, we need agro entrepreneurs to identify the “gap” mentioned above, agro technologists to come up with actual solutions and agro professionals to run the show on daily basis.
We are sometimes misled by media frenzy (especially when ISRO achieves a new feat) into thinking that sooner India will be a super power or a developed nation. 50% of Indian households are involved in the occupation of agriculture, whereas in USA it is merely 0.7%. Yet, US is a food self-sufficient country. It is a major exporter of wheat. By virtue of Indian agriculture being low-tech, majority of these 50% earn meagre income and are neither contributors nor beneficiaries in many things that we proclaim to be a grand achievement of this nation.
What is the significance of our figure (workforce) being 50% and USA’s being 0.7% and yet USA doing so well in agriculture?
Different countries, different stories
If you look at the history of economic development of nations, you can see a pattern. All countries (or perhaps “civilizations” would be the right word) began with all the jobs being initially low-tech and labour intensive, with almost entire workforce into primary sector of economy (includes agriculture, fishing). As time progresses, with the advancement of technology, agriculture (or Primary sector in general) would receive support from manufacturing sectors like fertilizer, tractor, combine harvester, etc and also services like insurance, weather forecasting, crop R&D, etc.
Recently, my girlfriend gifted me an iPhone, which I am still getting used to. The hardware is a product of 21st century manufacturing and the applications that it runs are products of numerous service providers. In no stretch of imagination would an early man ever thought that it would come this far. Even we do not know how far it will go in the future.
In a closed economic system, these three sectors will be intricately linked. The manufacturing and services in that system would aid and help increase the productivity of agriculture. Manufacturing processes would in turn receive help from services to help make its processed more efficient. Due to our agriculture’s unwillingness (or apathy) to adopt technological advances, Indian manufacturing and services could not do much to boost our agricultural productivity. Thanks to economic liberalization of 1990s, now our services sector is serving foreign manufacturing, mining and agriculture – which is an aberration, helping boost their productivity and income.
During this process, the workforce composition would see a shift from agriculture to manufacture and manufacture to services, leading to majority of workforce being deployed in services and a meagre in agriculture. Due to higher levels of productivity in manufacturing and further higher levels in services, the income earned by workers in these sectors would keep increasing. This shift results in higher per capita GDP (indicative of the average income of an individual). India's GDP per capita is $1,983, whereas for US, it is $59,501. Investopedia defines a developed nation to be one with GDP per capita exceeding $12,000. Do you think, India would be a developed nation by 2020, as once wished by a great man? To be a developed nation, we need advanced technological infrastructure touching all sectors of the economy and all workers. With 50% of India’s workforce still 50 years backwards in technology, it is just a pipe dream.
Each developed country became one under different circumstances. For example, colonialism was a major catalyst for many European countries to become industrial powers. USA became an industrial power during WW2. The upsurge of Japan, S.Korea, W.Germany into industrial giants was helped by the golden age of Capitalism. However, despite the diversity, one common thing that characterized the path of all these countries that became industrialized was the massive creation of blue collar jobs to be employed in manufacturing.
Even China came out of extreme poverty, by achieving massive growth rates in the last 3 decades by providing huge number of low-skill blue collar jobs. This story has now come to an end, thanks to the 4th industrial revolution. Now, production processes do not require low-tech workers. The only jobs available today are high tech, knowledge based jobs. Think about the way AI and automation are taking away jobs. This is exactly the reason why the now developing economics (India, China, Bangladesh, Brazil, etc) cannot anymore tread the development trajectory that the now developed economics (USA, Europe, Japan, S.Korea, etc) earlier took.
Indian agriculture and Moore’s Law
I have frequently referred to Indian agriculture to have been stuck with low-tech implements. Let us delve into this a bit. Let me take one single aspect of technology to make this interesting.
I had earlier mentioned that a technological advancement in any field will have an impact in a different field too. If you are from Science or Engineering background, you must be knowing about Moore's law. It is basically an observation that the density of transistors in integrated circuits double over roughly every 18 months, starting from 1970s. While we can quantitatively as well as qualitatively substantiate how different sectors like space industry, telecommunication, and medical science benefitted from the phenomenon that was explained by Moore's law, it would evoke a shock and surprise from Gordon Moore himself (who co-founded Intel Corporation) to know that there is no answer to the question – “How has Indian agriculture evolved with Moore's law?”
I can sense that you think I am too much ambitious. Has our agriculture made use of every other thing that preceded miniaturization of ICs?
After the green revolution was imported (yeah, it was generous on our part back then to do ourselves a favour!) from Mexico and the Philippines in 1960, there has practically been no major advancement. Any rise in farm income, would have been mainly due to government support programmes, better irrigation, increased acreage and crop diversification (towards horticulture and other cash crops). These factors cannot be said to have improved the productivity or efficiency itself. For our purposes, productivity can be taken as yield (per hectare) and efficiency can be taken as water, electricity and other inputs consumed per unit of the produce. Our productivity is poorer than many countries that are even behind India. Indian agriculture uses more than 70% of all surface as well as ground water. There is no incentive or interest to being about improvements.
I brought in Moore’s law because the transistor miniaturization began at roughly the same time as our green revolution. At that time, 70% of our workforce was into the occupation of agriculture. In about 50 years of time, just 20% of the workforce has shifted to manufacturing & services. Think about the immense potential for improvement Indian agriculture holds.
Rising productivity in agriculture has another important dimension. It will aid the socio-economic mobility, breaking the barriers of old feudal set up, beyond the compulsions of geography. To be a global citizen is everyone’s right.
Modernisation of agriculture also holds the key for good number of job creation in manufacturing and services sectors in the coming days.
Is it a Gordian knot?
I know that Indian agriculture is facing numerous problems and I am neither unaware nor overlooking them. I am mentioning some major issues here just to give a perspective. You could choose to skip reading the next 2 passages.
They are erratic monsoon, climate change, pest problem, drought, the problem of surplus (during good monsoon), fragmented holdings, inadequate transport, storage and food processing facilities, exploitative middlemen, fragmented markets, inadequate agricultural extension services, encroachment / over-exploitation of Common Property Resources, poor access to formal credit, coverage of insurance, unpopularity of financial hedging instruments like futures contracts.
I should give the credit where it is due. Our governments have tried to solve many of these problems with multiplicity of schemes like Agricultural Debt Waiver, Minimum support prices, E-National agricultural market, BGREI, SAMPADA, MGNREGA, Krishi Sinchai, Fasal Bima Yojana, Pramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojna, National Programme for Organic Production, Soil Heath card, Kisan credit card, Attracting and Retaining Youth in Agriculture (ARYA), NADAMS, CHAMAN.
One can counter me by citing any of these problem areas mentioned above. But, my goal in this post is to address the general antipathy to technology and modernization in agriculture. Without banking on technology with the intent to rise farm productivity, nothing will change in the ground level. Any change, if at all, has thus far been largely cosmetic in nature. It is appropriate time for governments to shun stopgap populist arrangements like loan waivers, and invest in long-term solutions.
Recently, the Government of India announced an ambitious goal of doubling farm income by 2022 (8 years ahead of the target set for UN Sustainable Development Goal 2.3, having the same goal). I believe that this goal is achievable, if we get Indian youth to work for agriculture, supported by capital infusion from government as well as private investors.
I am tired of hearing that agriculture is a non-remunerative sector. How do you label an entire sector to be non-remunerative? It absolutely makes no sense to me. How remunerative a sector is – is solely dependent on the level of productivity. Here, we have a sector with immense potential. It’s true that recently there are popular sentiments against industrialization, with skeptical attitude towards science and modernity and there is this talk of “returning” to the glorious past by reviving traditional agricultural practices. I have respect for tradition, but thinking that all traditional things are great and modernity is a manifestation of capitalist conspiracy is sure way of self-destruction. Anyway, Good luck to all of you – who wish to time travel!
Your patience is appreciated
In the pre-modern times, India and China dominated the world economic scene, mainly because of the fact that all the processes were more labour intensive. The populous regions (India and China have vast tracts of fertile land and perennial rivers) of the world naturally had the algebra in their favour. This changed slowly with the coming of Industrial revolution. Of course, the European imperialist powers did their role in impoverishing the once prosperous regions.
By the rule of nature (Darwinism, to be precise), we can say that when two unequal civilizations meet, the advanced one will vanquish the backward one. Think about the encounter between Europeans and native Americans in the "new world". It's wasn't a pleasant meeting, with the ramifications still unanswered today. This purging hasn't happened to Indian agriculture so far due to skewed incentives and political & legal protection accorded to an inefficient system. I am unable to ignore the suggestion that politicians are more benefitted with status quo and are not inclined to address the root of the issue. Anyway, that question is important only when you keep asking “what was incorrectly done?” than focus on “what can be done now?”
In 2018, a country of 1.35 billion, having 50% of its population in the vocation of farming is a colossal problem. If this is not addressed today, it will become more difficult with every day that passes by.
You cannot hope go to Mars on a Catamaran!
Finally, a small compliment for motivation :)