If agricultural output did not go down in a major drought, some big comments and questions should have been raised. The comments should have been on the changing nature of the economy, its resilience and strengths. There should have been questions about how we can sustain and accentuate these strengths. But, as a country, we love to run people down and fix blame. Good news is unacceptable, particularly if it comes from a desi. This fellow Alagh must have an agenda. So, India was growing fast only when the IMF and a Harvard don said it. Seven years of Indian economists saying it earlier was just a rant.

Every trend in Indian agriculture was accentuated in the drought year. Some good, some bad. The bad was largely on account of policies from ancien r?gime, as the French would put it, but bad all the same. Grain output fell, which was expected in a drought year but was also the underlying trend. The annual average of foodgrains output was three quarters of one per cent in the period from 2002 to 2009. There is some uncertainty on area figures but more than half the growth is explained by area growth on account of the bounty of MSPs.

Foodgrains are expanding in areas where they were earlier declining on account of diversification. In fact, in an argument with Tushaar Shah, Ashok Gulati and Hemant P, I had shown that in Gujarat the area under foodgrains that went down from 49% in the triennium 1970-73 to 35.5% in 2000-03 and goes up to 37.77% in 2005-08 as an IIM-A book, edited by Ravi Dholakia, brought out. And, in fact, the area went up even more since and was higher in the period 2006-09. The agriculture sector has a very heavy hand of the state and it shows. Therefore, it was a bit disappointing when the senior most economic advisor to the government saw policy towards agriculture as largely keeping grain prices down, in a recent exchange.

Actually, it is interesting that even in a severe drought with falling output, grain stocks actually went up. The uneven impact of the kharif rainfall failure in 2009, with the worst impact on highly irrigated areas, led to this interesting outcome. But it was an unusual weather quirk that led to large surpluses in spite of low levels of rainfall and this cannot be considered a usual phenomenon. But more enduring was the upsurge in non-foodgrains crop output. The underlying growth trend here has been around 4% annually over a decade, but more recently in the Tenth Plan, the growth has been close to 6% and could have clocked around 3% even in a drought year.

It is interesting that the rainfall failure in July 2009 is expected to increase the planted area under pulses and oilseeds, for example, as compared to cotton and grains. A meteorological drought, as we argued, is different from an agricultural drought. The non-foodgrains sector responds very effectively to price changes, since the state plays a minimal role and is showing buoyancies of a kind not seen earlier. This is happening in a more effective manner in vegetables, fruits and animal husbandry products, which have all shown high growth even in a drought year.

Underlying all this has been a rapid increase in quality inputs in agriculture. Pesticides demand, for example, has been rising at around 10%, although the quantity increase is only 2-3%, showing a movement away from just pesticide use to a more selective use of quality purchases by the farmer. The pesticide market was sluggish last year but not as much as in earlier droughts. Similarly, the trend in fertiliser, now that the sector has been partially deregulated, is towards the use of quality products in terms of balancing nutrients and customised products. Here the demand is rising by 15-20% annually as compared to about 5% in the traditional products.

Farmers don?t eat fertilisers and pesticides. And, therefore, there is emerging, surely and in a larger measure, a smarter and more discriminating market in ever increasing larger areas. It would be unwise to ignore these trends and, in fact, to sidestep them. The announcement that eastern India is to be saturated with hybrid paddy is the kind of policy we have been waiting for, for the last 15 years.

The country will eagerly look forward to the details concerning policies for overcoming the earlier failures. More such initiatives are in order.

The author is a former Union minister