Agriculture and Budget

Agriculture and Budget

The agriculture sector which employs more than 55% of  India's work force stands at a cross roads. Measures taken by the government during next few years would decide  the shape the agriculture sector would take 

 

Huge food grains stocks and rising exports of India’s agricultural goods, the union budget presentation for 2013-14 would not have come at a better time for the sector which employs more than half of country’s working class population. 

As finance minister P Chidambaram rose to present the union budget for the year 2013- 14, there was lot of expectation from the arming community. Nothing explains the agriculture sector better than the Economic Survey 2012-13 presented before the parliament just a day before the union budget was announced. The survey observed “Indian agriculture is broadly a story of success. It has done remarkably well in terms of output growth, despite weather and price shocks in the past few years,”.  

The Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007-12) agricultural and allied sector witnessed an average annual growth of 3.6 percent in the gross domestic product (GDP) against a target of 4.0 percent. While it may appear that the performance of the agriculture and allied sector has fallen short of the target, production has improved remarkably, growing twice as fast as population. “India’s agricultural exports are booming at a time when many other leading producers are experiencing difficulties,” the survey which is an annual report card of government’s performance noted.  
 

READ MORE >>

Tribal Development Approach

Tribal Neglect and Limitations of Budget-centric Approach to Development

 

In addition to spending budgets, we need to give equal importance to non-monetary issues such as institutions, laws, and policies

  

It is well established that the central region of India, despite being resource rich, inhabits the poorest people who have not benefited from social and economic development to the same extent as people in other regions have, and in many cases have actually been harmed from displacement that growth entails. From the viewpoint of policy, it is important to understand that tribal communities are vulnerable not only because they are poor, assetless and illiterate compared to the general population; often their distinct vulnerability arises from their inability to negotiate and cope with the consequences of their forced integration with the mainstream economy, society, cultural and political system, from which they were historically protected as the result of their relative isolation. Post-independence, the requirements of planned development brought with them the spectre of dams, mines, industries and roads on tribal lands. With these came the concomitant processes of displacement, both literal and metaphorical — as tribal institutions and practices were forced into uneasy existence with or gave way to market or formal state institutions (most significantly, in the legal sphere), tribal peoples found themselves at a profound disadvantage with respect to the influx of better-equipped outsiders into tribal areas. The repercussions for the already fragile socio-economic livelihood base of the tribals were devastating — ranging from loss of livelihoods, land alienation on a vast scale, to hereditary bondage.  

As tribal people in India perilously, sometimes hopelessly, grapple with these tragic consequences, the small clutch of bureaucratic programmes have done little to assist the precipitous pauperisation, exploitation and disintegration of these communities. Tribal people respond occasionally with anger and assertion, but often also in anomie and despair, because the following persistent problems have by and large remained unattended to:  

-Land alienation
-Indebtedness
-Relation with forests, and government monopoly over MFPs, and non-implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006
-Ineffective implementation of Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996 (PESA, 1996) for Schedule V areas.
-Involuntary displacement due to development projects and lack of proper rehabilitation.
-Shifting Cultivation, such as podu
-Poor utilisation of government funds, and
-Poor delivery of government programmes

READ MORE >>