Economic Liberalisation and Indian Agriculture: A District-Level Study
GS Bhalla and Gurmail Singh
SAGE Publications, Rs 795, Pp 396
Professor Gurdarshan Singh Bhalla has for decades been a must read in Indian agricultural economics. Economic Liberalisation and Indian Agriculture: A District-Level Study by GS Bhalla and Gurmail Singh is the last of an iconic series, which for 30 years tracked the structure, growth and regional and crop-wise spread of Indian agriculture.
GS Bhalla has a formidable reputation. An avowed Marxist, he has been in the liberal communist tradition of Lucas, Hobsbawm, Dobb and our own Kosambi and Hiren Mukherjee. His earliest work was on the green revolution in Haryana. The orthodox view then was that it was for large farmers and won?t spread. Bhalla?s hypothesis was that it would increase inequality and not spread. But the facts were contrary. The class of adopters was more equal than the class of non-adopters. For the Marxist scholar, material facts were sacred and Bhalla, together with Vijai Vyas, was to prove the counter-factuals.
In 1974, I was to go to the Planning Commission to head its perspective planning division (PPD), then the most influential thinking group in the government. I was mandated to plan for food self-reliance. The original green revolution had petered out and the World Bank-finance ministry orthodoxy was that India won?t make it and was a basket case. But there were no facts. PPD had good methods of making steel, cement and machine projections, but not agriculture. In fact, in an exercise I got done, the norms they used did not explain actual or weather corrected output of grains for India or any state in any year. So I wrote to every collector in India and asked them to send me the data which would have otherwise come three years later. They were excited and some hand delivered it to my office. Bhalla was my teacher and friend and I took it to him and said we will work on it together. This was the famous JNU-PPD study later included in the Bhalla and Alagh book on the performance of Indian agriculture. I designed two tables on the structure and growth and spread of output and inputs which appeared in the final version of the Fifth Plan as JNU/PPD and we never looked back. I have described the impact of that study in my entry on the green revolution in the Kaushik Basu-edited Oxford Economic Atlas of India and the Millennium Farmers of India series, but Bhalla was to pursue the track with a persistence that only a Moga Jat Marxist has and an erudition of his LSE training and first degree in maths. Bhalla and Alagh (1979) was to be followed by Bhalla and Tyagi (1989) and then Bhalla and Gurmail Singh (2001, 2012). It is all put together in this last of the series.
Bhalla has no need to vent or speculate. The book is a cool authoritative recollection of what happened and occasional jibes at what did not. He sets the stage, quoting Gulati on overvalued exchange rates, protection and distorted cropping patterns, import substitution and bias and sector-specific distortions. Then Dholakia on removing biases and the WTO, but ?agricultural growth in India recorded a visible deceleration during the post-liberalisation period? (as early as p 6). The Eighties was the best decade, the Nineties the worst. Between the Sixties and the early Eighties, ?the new… technology introduced in the irrigated areas of the north-west during the mid-Sixties gradually spread to new areas? (p 29). ?The period 1980-83 to 1990-93 marks a turning point in India?s agricultural development?(p 28). More important… ?an interesting feature of the 1980s was that agricultural growth permeated all regions of India?(p29). I remember the excitement when in 1982 as chairman of the APC, I reported to the Indian Conference of Agricultural Economics that agricultural productivity in eastern UP had reached green revolution levels in Haryana in the earlier decade. Eastern UP was the orthodoxy of institutional barriers (the great Thorner) and while they published my inaugural address, they were sceptical. Bhalla notes the impact of his studies on planning although there is less on agro climatic planning and the Eighties, which others like me were to take on. On post-liberalisation ?the most important feature of this period is that agricultural growth decelerated sharply at the all-India level and in all regions?(pp 29-30). Yield growth was high in the Eighties and was to come down in the Nineties. And the variability of yield was to go up (pp 34-35). There is no magic in all this. Bhalla mercilessly shows the deceleration of input growth in the Nineties as compared to the Eighties as a pan-Indian phenomenon (pp 41-47).
Liberalisation was to diversify Indian agriculture. ?The process of diversification, which began from 1980-83 to1990-93, continued from 1990-93 to 2005-08, albeit at a slower rate…?(p 49).
There is a lot of econometrics for the connoisseurs. But one piece brings back a memory and is currently of interest. For all the periods, Bhalla reports that ?high rates of agricultural output are associated with higher growth rates of agricultural work force and vice-versa. This very high labour absorption in fast growing regions was characterised as the suction mechanism in an earlier study (Alagh, Bhalla and Bhaduri, 1978)? (p 154).
But, first the memory, then the current interest.
KN Raj went to set up ILO ARTEP in Bangkok and discovered that Ishikawa had shown this for Asian agriculture and we were to test it for India. Now what Raj says was a farman and I, Bhalla and Amit Bhaduri went about it over long painful nights at my place with spiritual nourishment of Scottish origin sustaining us. Bhaduri kept on saying this rectangular hyperbola between land productivity and land-man ratio is just a tautology and a truism, and at one point I had to butt in with Bhaduri that let?s finish this since truisms are better than falseisms. The paper was extensively quoted.
The current interest is that the curves Bhalla draws are of great relevance for my favourite story of Census Towns in 2011, the forgotten habitations to which millions of farmers go after markets. And, we ignore them, for the FDIwallahs are in the metros.
The author is a former Union minister