It’s the agriculture, stupid
The fastest growing
economy with falling inflation, rising FDI and declining
interest rates, and yet there are long faces everywhere. A
decimated Opposition is feeling rejuvenated, and the
government looks more than a little besieged. How can
politics so defy economic indicators? Explanation for this
lies in farming, in the cruel fact that India may no longer
be an agrarian economy but still has an agricultural policy.
Let’s see how.
Why rural India matters:
Agriculture’s share in economic GDP may be low but in
electoral, political equivalent of GDP, it is about 60 per
cent
You can look at numbers and statistics in many different
ways. One, of course, is the old, if sexist, truism about
statistics being like a bikini, revealing what is
interesting and concealing what is vital.
The other, from the
pre-bikini era is Benjamin Disraeli’s definition of
statistics being worse than “lies, damned lies”. But none of
the two apply to reading data on agriculture in a poor
country with a per capita income in the $1,500 category.
Because, for their real
meaning to be understood, farm statistics must be first
translated from simple numerals or graphics into politics.
As Prime Minister Narendra
Modi also seems to have figured out lately, Indian politics
is first and foremost about the farmer, and never mind the
fact that his contribution to national GDP is now below 15
per cent.
Or maybe because it is only
15 per cent. Nothing about Indian politics is so
straightforward, except its organic linkage with the farmer.
There is celebration now that India’s GDP grew at 7.3 per
cent in financial year 2014-15. Projections for 2015-16 are
7.8 per cent (Finance Ministry) and 7.6 per cent (RBI).
It should still give India a
first opportunity to beat China in annual growth rate,
forgetting for this heady moment an enormously larger base
there. Yet there seems such concern in the government, and
the markets are responding accordingly.
The fastest growing economy with falling inflation, rising
FDI and declining interest rates, and yet there are long
faces everywhere.
A decimated Opposition is
feeling rejuvenated, and the government looks more than a
little besieged. How can politics so defy economic
indicators? Explanation for this lies in farming, in the
cruel fact that India may no longer be an agrarian economy
but still has an agricultural policy. Let’s see how.
While India grew by 7.3 per
cent last year, agriculture was stagnant, at .02 per cent,
with food-grain production falling a little over 5 per cent.
The previous year saw overall
growth at 6.9 per cent, and 3.6 per cent wasn’t too bad for
agriculture. But if you look at 1.5 per cent growth in
2012-13, you get a three-year growth average of 1.7 per cent
in farm production, trailing overall national growth by
three-fourths.
This is the key data point
underlying rural distress, and complicating politics for
Modi early in his term. It isn’t just one ill-fated Rabi
(winter) crop cursed by fiendish weather.
To the breathless trumpeters of industry-led growth-this
columnist admits to being one-this is confusing. As with all
fast-developing economies, the share of farming is declining
in India’s GDP as services and manufacturing rise, which is
how it should be.
And so what if agriculture is
struggling, because you need to pull more people out of
economic obsolescence into more productive pursuits.
So urbanise, industrialise,
and that should be the perfect justification for easing the
laws to allow acquisition of more of farmers’ land.
Once again, here I have to be
conscious of where I am headed because I strongly support
the new land acquisition law.
Again, the picture changes once you remind yourself that you
are looking at agricultural figures, and not any old
statistics. India’s foremost expert on farm economics and
markets, Infosys Chair Professor at New Delhi-based ICRIER
(Indian Council for Research on International Economic
Relations) Ashok Gulati estimates that 49 per cent of
India’s workforce is employed in farming.
And since rural families tend
to be larger on an average, this would mean anything from
55-60 per cent of our population is farm-dependent. Now
reverse the equation: half the workforce produces just a
seventh of the GDP and nearly two-third of India subsists on
it.
Broadly, then, the farmer
earns less than a fourth of what others do on an average.
Then you add that this population has averaged 1.7 per cent
growth for three years against overall economy’s 6 per cent.
You get the picture of rural distress.
Again, Gulati, whose help in
finding evidence of my political hypothesis of Indian
agriculture I most gratefully acknowledge, points out that
farm growth reduces poverty two to three times faster than
other sectors together.
According to the World
Development Report of 2008, for China, this farm
growth-poverty reduction coefficient is as high as 3.5
times-and even for Latin America 2.7.
It stands to reason when you
look back at more than half the population living on
one-seventh of national income, thereby accounting for the
bulk of the real poor.
There are broadly two schools of economists on the
importance of farming. One, led by my old friend, fellow
limousine liberal and brilliant columnist Surjit Bhalla,
underlines its obsolescence and the fact that large
economies rarely hit higher than 4 per cent growth in the
farm sector over any length of time.
The other, which we may call
the Gulati school, asks, why not? China saw agricultural
growth twice as high between 1978 and ’84, early years of
its reform.
Another good question is, if averaging more than 4 per cent
wasn’t possible, how come at least five states in India have
done it for a decade now? And each of these is larger than
many nations.
And now the clincher: each
one of these five states is a BJP stronghold, three of the
five have returned the same chief minister to power for the
third time. Similarly, at the other end of the spectrum, the
biggest laggard, Kerala, with a marginal negative growth, is
mired in terminal anti-incumbency.
Middling Maharashtra too has
got tired of Congress-NCP. And Uttar Pradesh, at 2 per cent,
brings up what you may call the secular rate of farm growth
to rival the old notional Hindu rate and has not re-elected
anybody in decades.
Bihar, another laggard
(though better than UP) broke the trend in 2010 only because
massive road building had boosted overall growth greatly in
Nitish Kumar‘s first five years.
Here then is my central Doctrine of Agro-Political
Incumbency. It is also the reason why the chart accompanying
this article is such a killer app to tracking-and
cracking-political fortunes even in an industrialising,
urbanising India.
Agriculture’s share in the
economic GDP may be below 15 per cent. But in electoral and
political equivalent of GDP, it is about 60 per cent.
The fun part is that both Rahul Gandhi and Modi have figured
it out.
That is why Rahul’s campaign
is centred on farm distress, and by linking the land bill
with it, he has turned the momentum of national discourse,
bringing the Opposition back from the dead. India has had
two indifferent crops already, and if the forecast of
drought comes through, there will be three.
That’s where Rahul is coming
from. But it is also the reason Modi, our sharpest public
figure in a long time, has shifted tracks. Look at his
speeches and interviews in the course of his government’s
first anniversary.
All address rural India, the
farmer, the poor. In Mathura, he even said capitalists,
“Dhanna Seths”, do not provide jobs, the smallest guy does.
That figure of 0.2 per cent
farm growth and the average of 1.7 per cent over three years
is much too overwhelming even for an overall growth of 7.3
per cent this year and three-year average of 6 per cent.
Because we are talking political GDPs here.
June, 2015
By: Shekhar Gupta
Source: Pakistan
Today