More is most definitely not good if it is the increasing number of rural folks turning to agriculture as an occupation. The reason? It puts to question the very growth trajectory of the Indian economy, where fast growth seen in the topline numbers should have seen an equivalent reduction in the number of people engaged in agriculture.
Between 2017 and now, nearly seven crore Indians took up farming as an occupation, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey. This increased the total number of our countrymen engaged in agriculture to nearly 26 crore (out of a population estimated at about 140 crore), going by one finding (these figures tend to vary). The figure was just 19 crore just seven years back.
It gets worse. The increase of people taking up farming in the last seven years is the highest in some of India’s poorest states, with usual suspect Uttar Pradesh leading from the front, along with compatriots Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. And data showed that more women are working on the fields than ever before.
It is no tale of empowerment, but rather, a matter of worry. Over the past decade and beyond, number of people engaged in agriculture was actually slowly coming down, as it is wont to as any nation industrialises and its economy is doing well – since that opens up jobs in manufacturing and service, quickly taken up by erstwhile farmers who move to urban areas and take up jobs in factories, construction sites, retail establishments, restaurants and hotels and the like.
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However, an about-turn in this trend, with perhaps these village folks returning home and going back to farming (of course, even while not discounting the fact that there could be fresh new entrants who could be taking up agriculture as a job) signifies only one thing – services and manufacturing, the cornerstone of India’s, or for that matter, any nation’s economic ascendancy, could be in peril.
“The average annual employment growth between 2017-18 and 2021-22 was 4 per cent and 3 per cent respectively,” pointed out Ashwini Deshpande, professor and head, department of economics at Ashoka University. “This indicates that the unorganised manufacturing sector suffered the twin impacts of demonetisation and the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the fact that overall, manufacturing employment has grown, but not at a high rate.”
While agriculture has always been a key source of income in India, the sector’s productivity and contribution to economic growth is low, with most of the high rural participation due to necessity than opportunity. The hope was that the transition towards more productive service and manufacturing jobs would be steady, even if slow. However the reverse growth, initially attributed to Covid and the reverse migration the Lockdowns caused but that is showing no signs of abating four years later, brings to question the very GDP growth that has been celebrated till recently, with the growth parameter also falling from near 7 per cent levels to a low of 5.4 per cent in the last quarter.
