Gopikrishna Warrier: You’re listening to Everything Environment by Mongabay-India.

In 1988, when I was in my mid-20s, I did two field travels that gave me insights into India’s agricultural systems. The first one was to Adagaon and the Purple Cow villages in the semi-arid Marathwada region of Maharashtra, where two NGOs Marathwada Sheti Sahayak Mandal, and Action for Food Production were helping farmers with water and soil conservation work in their fields. The second was to the Aravallis of Udaipur district in Rajasthan. 1988 was the fourth year of drought, and there was a severe water and food scarcity in the villages there. With no fodder, farmers were forced to abandon the cattle to die slow deaths, but the food-for-work schemes ensured that there were no human deaths.

Travelling through the Marathwada region introduced me to the difficulties faced by farmers in the rain-fed regions of the country. Conversations with farmers in the Aravalli villages of Udaipur opened my eyes to the importance of governmental support to overcome a crisis. I realised that farming in India is not just a vocation for millions of families, but the very lifeblood of their existence. It was their life support and also their livelihood safety net.

Decades later, this understanding for me was reinforced when millions of Indians who had migrated for employment within the country trekked back to the homes and farms when the COVID lockdown happened. But normal monsoonal rainfall and a normal khareef harvest had protected the Indian economy in 2020.

Welcome to our show Environomy. I am S. Gopikrishna Warrier, Managing Editor, Mongabay-India. Through this series of podcasts, I will take you through the journey of how environment and economics got interlocked after the economic reforms of 1991. This is a journey for which I had a ringside ticket as a journalist reporting and writing on the environment for the past three decades.

In the first four episodes, we looked at how the Indian middle class got a distinct economic and political voice after the economic reforms, how this affected Indian environmentalism, and how this changed the power equation between the executive and other pillars of democracy. We also examined the impact of the new economic order on the environment of the mountains and rivers.

In this fifth episode, we will examine the impact of economic reforms on the agricultural sector.

Though this sector contributes less than 20% of India’s GDP, it provides livelihood support to nearly half of the country’s population.

Sometime during my young reporter days, I had the opportunity to interact with a very senior technocrat, Ashok Parathasarthy, who was closely associated with the Indian National Agriculture Minister, C Subramaniam, in the mid-1960s. The 1960s were the years of severe food grain shortage in India, and Subramaniam had just returned from a tour to the USA to request for grains under the Public Law Poverty scheme.

Parathasarathy, who was in the group that had gone to receive Subramaniam, recalls that the minister was quiet during the drive home. Subramaniam communicated his humiliation to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who inquired if technical solutions were available anywhere in the world to increase India’s agricultural productivity.

Research work on high-yielding varieties were yielding results at the international agricultural research centers working on wheat and rice. The leadership at the Indian Council for Agricultural Research could get these varieties for cultivation in the irrigated tracts of India.

The Green Revolution in India was born.

The farmers in the irrigated tracts of the country were supplied with seeds of high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, and supported with financial credit, chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Food grain production and productivity boomed in these regions filling national markets and godowns with grains in a few years. The communities that had worked the land in the irrigated areas such as Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, and the irrigated enclaves across the country, became prosperous with the Green Revolution swagger.

Flash forward five decades to 2020. Farmers from Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh were sitting in protest against the three farm laws that the national government had announced. Elsewhere, in different parts of the country, the communities that had benefited from the Green Revolution, were asking for reservation support.

The question is why did this happen? When the post economic reforms growth benefited most sections of the Indian society financially, how was it that the farmers had felt left out? Why is it that farmers’ children do not want to continue in agriculture, but want to move to the cities in search of employment? The answers to these questions straddle across economics and the environment in the agricultural sector.

If the economic reforms of 1991 generally strengthened the economic welfare of different classes across the country, for farmers, it was a point that marked the start of a decline in their income. A group of agricultural economists studying this ironical phenomenon compiled their findings in a book in 2022. R Ramkumar, the editor of the book Distress in the Fields: Indian Agriculture after Economic Liberalisation, summarizes the 1991 shift succinctly.

If, from the time of the Green Revolution, the focus was on institutional and governmental support to agriculture, after the economic reforms, trade was seen as the instrument to drive agricultural growth. The argument was that if the prices are right, the incentive structure in agriculture would improve, and the farmers would respond to higher prices by producing more.

However, that was not to be. This undid most of the institutional support-based growth in agriculture production, productivity, and farm income that was recorded after the Green Revolution.

Let us start with the history of Indian agriculture since Independence. Experts categorise the period from 1947 to the present into four phases.

The first phase was between 1949-50 and 1964-65. These were the early years for the newly independent nation-state, and there was a push to bring new areas into agriculture. This was also the economic growth phase across the world, after the end of the Second World War. Malaria had been conquered with synthetic drugs. Chemicals such as DDT could help settler farmers to move into areas hitherto unapproachable for agriculture. Grasslands, and mid-altitude plateaus, which were earlier hotspots for malaria, were open to agriculture.  The first phase marked a period of extension of agricultural areas. The increase in yield did not happen in this phase. The Index of Agricultural Production, which indicates the trend in agricultural growth, registered a growth of 3.2% per annum during this phase.

The second phase between the mid-1960s to the beginning of the 1980s was when the Green Revolution was launched. This is the period when Agriculture Minister C Subramaniam returned from a humiliating mission to the USA. Interventions of support by governmental institutional network started the process of yield increase. The Index of Agricultural Production grew by 2.8% per annum.

The third phase or the late Green Revolution period, stretched from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. This is when the impact of the interventions materialised. The Index of Agricultural Production grew by 3.8% per annum.

The fourth phase started with the launch of economic reforms in 1991. This period marked a decline in the growth of in the Index of Agricultural Production to 2.2% per annum. The allied sectors, livestock and fisheries, which grew in the second and third phase, also declined in the fourth.

When the Green Revolution was launched, starting the mid-1960s, the agricultural sector was supported by these package of measures. 1) Higher price support for producers and lower price for consumers. 2) Credit support to farmers. The nationalisation of banks in 1969 helped this by establishing many rural branches. 3) There was import subsidy support for fertilisers and pesticides to keep the prices low for the farmers. Electricity for irrigation was mostly free of cost to farmers across the country. 4) Marketing support. Mandis in various locations ensured a stable and standardised market for farmers. 5)  Supply of improved seeds and access to extension centres of agriculture departments and agriculture universities.

Most of these lines of support changed after the economic reforms of 1991. There were changes in import subsidy, which were considered fiscally unsustainable. It was also argued that government should withdraw gradually from the functions of procurement and distribution of food grains, and the public distribution system should be targeted. Private trade could be relied to import or export, build or shed inventories as in how markets needed. Banks were encouraged to rationalise their rural branch networks. Priority sector lending and agricultural credit were diluted. Promotion of contract farming, corporate farming and dilution of agricultural production market centres happened.

To allow private operators to get economies of scale, the idea of land reform was diluted. To encourage private sector involvement in agricultural research, an intellectual property regime such as Plant Varieties Protection was endorsed in the agricultural sector. Public-private partnerships and the involvement of non-governmental organisations was encouraged for the extension network.

The only area where there was a growth for the farmers was in the area covered by irrigation. From around one-third of the total crop area during the onset of the Green Revolution, this has come to around a half today. The results of these changes, post-economic reforms, reflected badly on India’s agriculture. Agricultural growth rates dropped between 1992-93 and 2019-20. Even though agricultural exports grew by 13.8% between 1991 and 2019-20, agricultural imports grew by 18% in the same period. Clearly, the promise of export-led growth had not materialised.

There was a general slowdown in the diffusion of yield-increasing technologies and inputs. Mechanisation grew faster, while the size of land parcels declined. The bottom line was that across crops, profitability ratios either fell or stagnated in most parts of the country. This was more pronounced in smaller farms. The double whammy for the farmers were the decline or stagnation in output prices, while there was an increase in input prices. While income for farmers that grew after the Green Revolution stagnated and fell after the economic reforms, the adverse environmental impacts of the agricultural systems continued.

The biggest environmental issue from agriculture is water pollution from the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Unlike pollution from an industrial source, water pollution from agriculture is a non-point source and hence difficult to get flow data. It is easier to look at the expansion of agriculture in the past decades and the increase in consumption of fertilisers.

In 1951-52, a few years after Independence, the gross agriculture cropped area, some farms were cropped more than once in a year, was 131.89 million hectares. In 2019-20, this was 211.36 million hectares, an increase of 60%. The consumption of chemical fertilisers went up multiple times during this period, while the total consumption of nitrogenous phosphorus and potassium, which is usually referred as the NPK fertilisers, was 65,600 tonnes in 1951-52. It was 29.37 million tonnes in 2019-20. This is according to the data published by the Fertiliser Association of India.

When converted to per hectare figures, the NPK consumption in 1951-52 was half a kilogram for a hectare of cropland. It grew to 138 kilograms per hectare in 2019-20. The major point of change coincides with the launch of the Green Revolution in the mid 1960s. From 784,600 tonnes in 1965-66, fertiliser consumption doubled to 1.5 million tonnes in 1967-68, i.e. in two years. By 2020, India ranked second among countries in terms of NPK consumption, next only to China.

Considering the large area under agriculture, the comparative picture changes with per hectare consumption. India comes seventh in this following South Korea, Egypt, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Vietnam and Japan. The total pesticide consumption, on the other hand, was 61,700 tonnes in 2019-20.

Much of this chemical load drains from the soil into the nearby water bodies. Some even percolate to groundwater sources. This usually means an increased concentration of nitrates, phosphorus, and pesticides in water flowing out of the fields. While nitrates and phosphorus can adversely affect the ability of water bodies to support other forms of plants and animals, pesticides are known to have adverse impact on non-target organisms. Health impacts of contaminated water can vary from moderate to severe. Allergies, digestive problems, endocrine disruption, and even cancer have been reported from agrochemicals. In fact, it is the health impact of agri-chemicals that has led to many state governments and the national government to promote organic and natural farming.

In the recent decades, a changing climate is adding an additional layer of vulnerability to the farming community. Traditional Indian agriculture was built on the rhythms of monsoons. These cycles are getting lost. So even though when annual average rainfall amount remains normal, in many years, there is excess rains in short bursts, and long dry periods.

This is a double whammy for the farmers. On the one hand, they may have dry soil when they need water the most. On the other, the newly bred seeds also need very specific timeline for water availability. The changing rainfall profile also throws up new pests and diseases. By the time research finds answers for these, rainfall profile would have changed again in the next years.

According to the data compiled by the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, in the first two decades of the century, nearly 75 million hectares of cropped area was affected by extreme weather events. While it was floods in 2000, 2008, and every year from 2009 onwards, there were severe droughts in 2002 and 2009. Add to this the Gujarat earthquake of 2001 and the Asian tsunami of 2004, the uncertainties and the losses that the Indian farmer had had to bear were crippling.

Let us also remember that these losses have been striking the farmers as the average land-holding size has been decreasing, thereby decreasing the earnings of the farm families. The number of small farms measuring between one and two hectares, increased from 23.16 million in 1980-81 to 36.15 million in 2015-16. The number of marginal farms measuring below one hectare increased from 19.73 million in 1980-81 to 37.92 million in 2015-16. The number of large farms, on the other hand, those measuring more than 10 hectares in size, decreased from 37.70 million in 1980-81 to 14.34 million in 2015-16.

To put the numbers in perspective, in the year 2015-16, the last year for which this data is available, nearly 47% of Indian farmlands measured less than two hectares in size, while only 9% measured more than 10 hectares.

Lower income for farmers combined with increased risks, and an ecological footprint that is enlarging from agriculture sector marks the post economic reforms period from 1991. The industrial sector in India bloomed after the economic reforms. The services sector more or less was born after the economic reforms and piggybacked on this growth trajectory.

Farming in India has always been a private family occupation. All it needs is a bit of governmental and institutional support. I saw the impact of this support in 1988. For the farmers in the semi arid Marathwada villages, the support from NGOs was for water and soil conservation. For the drought-affected farmers of Udaipur district, the life-saving support came in the form of food-for-work schemes of the government.

The reform-led growth process since 1991 bypassed the agricultural sector while the environment problems continued to increase. Ironically, even as more farm lands ate into forested lands, there were more farmers feeling the pinch of decreased incomes. Finally, those communities that had benefited most from the Green Revolution, were on the streets protesting in 2020.

In the next episode, we will examine what happened to India’s biodiversity and how’s the nation dealing with climate change.

This episode was written and produced by me, S. Gopikrishna Warrier. Production Editor: Kartik Chandramouli. Audio Editor: Tejas Dayanand Sagar.