Introduction

The environment for Indian agriculture and policy has been changing since the post-independence era. Rapid economic growth and urbanisation are strengthening and diversifying consumer demand and placing pressure on existing production systems, marketing institutions, and infrastructure. Increased trade openness, whether unilateral or negotiated under a multilateral agreement, is challenging policies and structures that were established in a closed economy. The stream of benefits that flowed to producers and consumers from the adoption of Green Revolution technology has slowed. And, with the advent of competitive, multi-party and regional politics, the political environment for making and conducting agricultural policy has also changed.

Alongside the accelerating growth and investment now occurring in India's industrial and service sectors, agriculture has, by most accounts, been faring poorly. Productivity levels for most crops remain well below world averages and output and yield growth have been slowing down. Budget outlays for subsidies on food grains and farm inputs have been rising while rates of new public and private investment in agriculture have remained low compared to other sectors. The apparent mismatch between buoyant consumer demand and sluggish farm productivity has begun to threaten India's long term pattern of food price stability. And, while there are both traditional and modern examples of international competitiveness, most of India's fragmented agricultural marketing and processing systems and supporting institutions remain unready to compete in global markets.

For many good reasons, it has proven difficult to transform Indian agricultural policy and institutions to perform in this new environment. Long standing policies are hard to change because they did, in fact, succeed in achieving the goal of food grain self-reliance.

What are the 4004 references about? What themes about the disasters do they address? Is there a common paradigm that dominates the thinking in these 4004? What is the appropriate way to comprehend a large and disparate variety? A human construct to simplify and organise complex reality is to devise a classification. But there is the problem of correct identification of both the individual and the group to which they belong. There also are situations of incompletion, misinformation and duplication. It is difficult to decipher details from titles that read like ‘solid foundation’, ‘without a warning’ and ‘caught in a trap’. Since these are penned as features in magazines, the design of these captions no doubt catch attention, but they also pose a problem in sorting. While these titles are bold yet mysterious, the ones authored by administrators and government officials are cautious and tight-lipped.

Labels like ‘Flood Picture in States’ or ‘Notes and News’ or ‘The Koyna Earthquake’, ‘1959 October floods of Damodar river’, ‘Assam earthquake of 1950’, ‘The Bihar flood story’, ‘The Indian Earthquake’, are mind teasers. Articles in journals that promised too much were also problematic. Take for example, research units that specified that their work was on ‘cause, characteristics, impact, response and management’, ironically covered the article in six to ten pages of a journal. These, either addressed issues with extreme generality or did not sufficiently meet their claims.

Introduction

India has experienced a remarkable growth in the production of various agricultural commodities over the last four decades. Though technological intervention in the mid 1960s contributed significantly towards bringing the country from deficit to surplus stage in food grains production, the recent trend of cropping system is creating a lot of problems related to sustainability and market imbalances. Several studies suggest that the reform policy of the government only focussed on price measures and ignored the infrastructural and institutional changes which have caused an unfavourable effect on agricultural growth in recent decades (Kumar, 2002; Chand, 2005). Various empirical studies have also shown the strong and positive impact of public investment on agricultural productivity and growth in India (Evenson et al., 1999; Chand, 2001; Landes, 2004), which has been declining over time. But contrary to this, for competing in the world market with the emergence of the WTO, Indian agriculture needs more public investment and policy support in several areas to overcome prevailing structural weaknesses such as a low scale of operation, high post harvest losses, poor rural infrastructure, a lack of product diversification, inadequate R&D spending, low productivity, an absence of marketing infrastructure and inadequate financial support (Chandrashekhar, 2002; Naik, 2003).

The agricultural production system is broadly categorised into these sub-components – input supply, production, processing, sales and distribution to consumers and quality and food safety measures. Interaction between these components is negligible throughout the agriculture sector in India. In practice, most of these components act independently and the flow of information between different components is either missing or very poor.

The management of the natural resources is important for the welfare of any country. In particularly agrarian societies, natural resources like land, water and forests played a significant role. Of late, the environmental degradation and destruction of natural resources like forests have attracted the attention of the scholars across the globe. The scarcity of the natural resources worldwide, which generated many conflicts in recent decades, has affected the quality of human life as well as the natural environment. This deterioration is not a recent phenomenon. It is a process evolved in history: in the forest policies and the economies that generated such policies. The study of these aspects is called environmental history, ‘whose principal goal has become one of deepening our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time, and, conversely, how they have affected the environment and with what result’.

In India too, whose economy is predominantly agrarian, people are dependent on its natural resources for their livelihood and sustenance. The management and utilization of natural resources like forests, land and water is crucial if viewed from the historical perspective. It has been observed by the historians that from nineteenth century onwards the management of natural resources have been increasingly brought under the control of the State. Though the government intervention was not unknown in the pre-British period, the major difference between the pre-British times and British period lies in the scale and magnitude of this intervention and the everlasting impact it has had on the society.

Introduction

The Indian economic liberalisation was initiated in the 1990s, but the opening up of the agriculture sector started in 1994. Reforms such as the abolition of minimum export prices on basmati rice, the removal of import controls on sugar, cotton and common rice and the reforms in the edible oil sector, among others, led to this agricultural liberalisation (Gulati and Kelly, 1999). In the liberalised era, due to the devaluation of the rupee in 1991, the terms of trade moved in favour of agriculture, giving a boost to agricultural exports. The 1990s movement was in contrast to the one in the 1980s when the terms of trade were not in favour of agriculture and yet crop production was higher than in the 1990s. The agricultural trade surplus was expected to uplift the agriculture sector with a positive impact on the economic conditions of the farmers dependent on this sector. But this could not happen because the price situation changed after the implementation of the Uruguay Round Agreement between 1986–1994, and the formation of the WTO in 1995 (Chand, 2002). International prices declined and domestic prices became higher than international prices in the post-WTO period. The export competitiveness of India eroded and the country became an important market for imports of agricultural commodities. With changing terms of trade the relative prices of important crops, rice and wheat, increased as compared to a decreasing trend in the pre-WTO period (Mishra, 2004).

Due to various controls, subsidies, domestic price policies and a weak integration with the world economy, the full benefits of liberalisation could not be availed by the Indian agriculture sector.

Research on a diversity of natural disasters encompasses 5017 research units. There is research on storm surges to landslips, cold wave to heat wave, earthquakes to cyclones, dust storms to rain storms. A subtle difference and the experts are quick to qualify them with another name. Thus, debris slide, landslip, rock-fall, slope-failure can all be categorised under a landslide. An alteration in velocity and a cyclone transforms to a super cyclone; a change in magnitude and a moderate earthquake is labelled as an intense type; a modification in the intensity and heavy rainfall is termed as a cloudburst.

Some researchers use the geographical setting as a characteristic of the natural disasters. Thus, coastal disasters are considered different from those in the mountains. In certain units, the element of nature dictates the choice of some of the research units. There are water related, weather associated or geomorphology associated disasters. There are still other ways to sort the natural disasters among the 5017 research units.

There are researchers who have worked on the slow type of disasters like a drought, cold wave or heat wave while many others have worked on sudden and quick types like earthquakes, cyclones and tsunami. Using the feel of a natural disaster they could be grouped into the shaky, windy and the wet kind. Earthquake, cyclone and heavy rain respectively would fall into these three different types.

The study of disasters runs parallel to the study of Indian society, economy, polity, music, paintings and sculpture. One need not go too far to seek the reason. As part and parcel of the planetary process, earthquakes, floods, droughts, and cyclones or for that matter, cold and heat waves are neither alien nor recent entrants to India. Arriving suddenly or building steadily, natural disasters have continued to take a toll on life in India since eons. Even though they are perceived as natural events, the fact that they are not viewed as ‘normal’ implies that they cannot be overlooked. The result is that references to natural disasters are interpolated into travel accounts, chronicles, and administrative reports and inscribed in edicts or weaved within legends. Strewn across this ‘literature’ is the source of the study of natural disasters in India. Be it an account, description or even a story, these involve research, imagination and thought. There is little doubt that if such sources were amassed from every language, class and creed of India, the wealth would enrich our understanding of the study of natural disasters.

While the retrieval, translation and analysis of these materials is a project worth a lifetime, yet its scope unfortunately falls out of the compass of this book. This is because in all such references, the description of disasters is embedded within larger texts and is incidental to the context.

Indian agriculture is seriously lagging behind other sectors. Agricultural incomes are increasing at a much slower pace than in other sectors. A marked dualism, symbolised by the phrase ‘India versus Bharat’, has already emerged between the agriculture and rural sector on the one hand and the rest of the economy – services and manufacturing on the other. This is unsustainable. All efforts need to be made to bridge this widening gap and accelerate the pace of output and productivity growth in agriculture. Clearly, India needs a second Green Revolution to achieve its planned growth targets.

In the above context, the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) was requested by the Ministry of External Affairs to organise a seminar which would address two core issues, namely, agriculture reform and prospects of agri-business investment under the aegis of the U S A–India Agricultural Knowledge Initiative. The initiative was launched as a fall-out of Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh's visit to the U S A in 2005. The seminar was organised on 30 April, 2007. It was well-attended by agriculture experts, policy makers, international trade experts, NGOs, academicians and industry representatives. With the active support of NABARD (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development), one of the sponsors of the seminar, ICRIER has put together the specially commissioned studies in this seminar volume edited by Dr Surabhi Mittal and Dr Arpita Mukherjee, Senior Fellows at ICRIER.

This book pulls together all the critical issues that the Indian agriculture sector is facing currently. A distinguishing feature of this volume is that it focusses on private-public partnership in agriculture for the benefit of the rural poor.

Introduction

There is a strong relationship between the performance of the agriculture sector and its effect on the overall performance of the Indian economy. Although its contribution to the GDP has declined over the years, the farming sector remains one of the essential economic activities since it provides food and nutritional security. It also contributes significantly to employment, income generation, poverty alleviation and the environment. However the sector continues to be unorganised and underdeveloped. This is because there are no central bodies that lobby for it with policy makers. While in markets, traders can form cartels, the farmers reaching such Agriculture Produce Markets Regulation Act (APMC) mandis are at the mercy of traders, and receive a price already fixed by such cartels rather than being able to collectively decide to sell to traders at a price remunerative to them. The farming sector remains underdeveloped also because the benefits of growth are yet to reach them. In terms of technology and inputs, the access of farmers to these is restricted by their limited ability to purchase them. Also the prices received by farmers for their products in the last few decades have been declining over the years.

The other concern is the uneven growth trajectory among different sections of the farming community within a region. For example, farmers growing wheat and mustard in Rajasthan have differential earnings (Multi Commodity Exchange [MCX] field surveys). This is due to the access to irrigation, technology, credit facilities, etc. made available in certain regions.