[Reader-list] How did Gujarat Become a Farming Paradise?

[Pawan Durani]

How did Gujarat Become a Farming Paradise?
Destiny willed it to be an agricultural laggard. But Gujarat is today
a farming paradise
by RN Bhaskar | Mar 18, 2010

http://business.in.com/article/india-budget-2010/how-did-gujarat-become-a-farming-paradise/11322/0

IT'S ALL TIED UP: Gujarat's new policy helped Jitesh Patel of Dolpur
benefit from contract farming
The onset of summer in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat can be a
frightening prospect. The rocky terrain of low hills and the semi-arid
plains begin to radiate immense heat. Rivers and wells dry up in
tandem. Water shortage looms large and the memory of the severe
drought of 1999-2000 returns to haunt. God bless the man who tries to
indulge in cultivation of crops in these parts.

But that’s exactly what hundreds of farmers do several times a year in
the heart of this unfriendly terrain. Wheat, cotton, banana, papaya,
sugarcane, tomatoes and a variety of other crops sprout all over,
erasing forever the cliché of Saurashtra being a parched expanse.

Today, one can spot crops that weren’t grown in these parts just four
or five years ago. In Adtala village, farmer Vallabhai Patel, who was
previously cultivating cotton, grows papayas. With a limited supply of
water, he got plentiful yield.

In Sarangpur, also in Saurashtra, Swami Arunibhagat is surely a
God-blessed man. A leader of the liberal religious group, Swaminarayan
Movement, he has converted 175 acres of dry land into a lush haven for
sugarcane, tomatoes and genetically modified cotton. He has achieved
record yields that have attracted farmers from more fertile lands to
come and learn how he did it. It almost looks like a miracle wrought
by Lord Hanuman of the famous temple in Sarangpur.

The swamiji is not alone. The entire region of Saurashtra, along with
neighbouring Kutch, a half-desert, half-salty marsh region, has become
the engine of a farming revolution in Gujarat, propelling the state
into one of the fastest growing agricultural economies in the country.
Gujarat’s agriculture has grown 9.6 percent per year in the last
decade or so, surpassing the national growth rate of 2.9 percent and
boosting rural incomes.

Agriculture in India has been condemned to an annual growth of 4
percent or less ever since the nation’s economic reforms pushed it
towards a service-oriented economy. The share of agriculture in
India’s gross domestic product (GDP) has fallen to just 16.6 percent
from 46.3 percent about six decades ago. Somewhere, policymakers
seemed to have ignored the importance of farming to the economy. But
Gujarat hasn’t allowed its keenness to promote industry overshadow its
farming sector.

“Although widely lauded for adopting an aggressive industrial policy
that has made Gujarat a much-favoured destination for investment, the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has actually devoted a great deal of
energy and resources to accelerating agricultural growth in the state
through a broad spectrum of policy initiatives,” say agricultural
scientist Ashok Gulati and four others in an article published by the
Economic and Political Weekly.

Studying the various points of attack that the state has used to
revive agriculture could thus unveil important lessons for the whole
country. After all, if the water-starved Saurashtra and Kutch could do
it, why not the rest of India?

Fertile Policies
At first glance, the agricultural miracle in Gujarat seems to have
been supported by factors such as good monsoon for most of the decade,
increasing minimum support prices from the Centre and the spread of BT
cotton, a lucrative cash crop. But all these benefits were available
to other parts of the country as well and the superlative performance
of Gujarat is not explained by them.

Gujarat was early to amend the laws governing the marketing of
agricultural produce and allow farmers to sell their output directly
to private buyers. Even today, many states haven’t done so and keep
the farmer tied to the official procurement hubs. Some have gone back
on reforms. But Gujarat has persisted with opening up market access to
farmers.

This also opened up contract farming. In 2004-05, Gujarat took an
unusual step. It allowed companies to buy crops from farmers a year in
advance. This helped the farmers hedge against price upheavals and
guaranteed a minimum price. What’s more, there is also some
flexibility to allow higher payments if prices rose at the time of
transaction. While it reduced market risks for the farmer, it also
encouraged companies to invest in farming indirectly.

The result is obvious everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the
500-acre farm of the Patel brothers in Dolpur in the district of
Sabarkantha, in the northeast of the state. Jitesh and Bhavesh, both
having done masters in agricultural science, have managed to bring
together plots owned by family members and friends and grow potato
with modern techniques. They contract out their future production to
Balaji, ITC and Pepsi. Their high yields have won them admirers. Each
week, their farm sees at least 300 visitors from the state as well as
Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, keen to learn their key to success. The
brothers now act as consultants to other farmers. Very soon, the
Patels will be investing Rs. 4 crore on a greenhouse to grow capsicum,
tomatoes and muskmelons.

Gujarat has also stepped up its extension services significantly in
the last decade, taking knowledge from research campuses to the farms.
In the last five years, Krushi Mahotsavs (Farm Festivals) have grown
in scope. As many as 18,600 villages host the event on the Akshaya
Tritiya day (an auspicious day in the Hindu Calendar falling in
May-June). University professors, government officers and even
ministers are required to spend time with farmers, listening to their
problems and developing solutions. While the quality of work in these
fairs needs to improve according to farmers, and the researchers need
to gain more practical experience, their impact in spreading awareness
about things such as soil quality is undeniable.

But the big change in Gujarat has come from the conservation of the
most crucial resource for farming – water.

Gujarat started by planning large dam projects such as Sardar Sarovar
Project (SSP) to achieve a breakthrough in agriculture. To this day,
its progress remains limited. Only a small portion of the potential
command area has been covered with irrigation facilities. The canal
irrigation system of Gujarat, while improving, is not adequate for its
needs. To take water to the really dry areas, the Narmada dam’s height
must be raised which the government is trying to accomplish. However,
even that high-cost strategy will not be enough to fulfil the demand
for water. “Agriculture suffered for centuries in Gujarat primarily
because it did not have water,” says P.K. Laheri, formerly chief
secretary of Gujarat and managing director of Sardar Sarovar Narmada
Nigam and now a director with Torrent Power. “It improved when we
began taking the waters of the Narmada to irrigate our fields. Then,
when the dam was built, more land came under cultivation. But a lot of
land continues to be rain-fed.”

That’s why Gujarat has embarked on a major exercise to conserve water
and use it more efficiently in the fields. The most important turning
point in the state’s agriculture has been the innovative management of
its groundwater resources. The state has adopted a combination of
rainwater harvesting – that traps water that would otherwise drain
away – and micro irrigation – that supplies each drop of water more
efficiently and directly to the plant. The movement has been a roaring
success and stories abound of conversion of barren lands into fertile
farms, rising yields and falling costs of cultivation across the
state.

Between 2001 and 2006, Chief Minister Narendra Modi ordered the
building of check dams wherever possible. His slogan was that rain
water in the fields should remain there and the water in rivulets
should remain there too. There was little sense in letting all this
water drain into the sea. The strategy worked. And farmers began to
see a rise in water tables year after year. Modi also streamlined the
supply of electricity to water pumps. Because they were getting
subsidised power, farmers had little incentive to save on its use or
keep pumps in good order to lower power consumption. As a result, much
power was wasted. Also, power theft was widely prevalent. Further,
farmers faced the problem of low-voltage power that helped nobody.

Modi, in his second year in power, ordered the uninterrupted supply of
quality power to farms for three-phase pumps for at least four hours a
day, but only in night. This ensured that farmers could use the pumps
only for a limited time and had to make the most of it. During the
day, industry got quality power. The scope for power theft reduced.
Farmer groups were initially angry with the changes, but came around
after some persuasion.

The government was still painfully aware that the key bottleneck would
be availability of water. Higher water tables and taller dams could go
only so far. The real need was to save water and use it more
efficiently. There was a need to champion micro irrigation. That’s
when the government formed Gujarat Green Revolution Company (GGRC).

The new company adopted a twin strategy. First, it made the subsidy
for micro irrigation available to all farmers, not just the poor ones.
The initial investment to install the plumbing for micro irrigation
could be prohibitive. Even after the subsidy, it would come to a big
sum and poor farmers would hesitate to make that investment. But for
the richer ones, the subsidy made it a compelling proposition and they
jumped in. This, in turn, showed the way for poorer farmers who
followed.

Second, GGRC tightened norms for the subsidy scheme ensuring that
companies didn’t sell pipes and move on to clinch more sales. It
insisted that micro irrigation technology providers also offer
extension services. To ensure compliance, it introduced a series of
norms – like how many agronomists must be employed for a given expanse
of land, how many field visits the experts must make and even the
price at which the systems could be sold. “The farmer needs
handholding,” says C.L.N. Rao, head agronomist with Netafim India,
market leader for micro irrigation systems in the state. “And once a
farmer sees money coming in... [the farmer] becomes the champion for
other farmers as well.”

Now there is even talk in Gujarat that the government will order that
power connections will be granted only if a farm has micro irrigation
facilities. This is so because drip, sprinkling and spraying systems
that come under the definition of micro irrigation deliver water very
close to the plant or even to the roots. They avoid delivering water
where it is not needed, thus reducing the growth of weeds. They don’t
allow water to seep too deep into earth.

Gujarat is also studying a policy adopted in Raipur, where electricity
tariffs for pumps of more than five horsepower invite the higher
industry-level tariffs and the smaller pumps enjoy the subsidised
agricultural tariffs. This is to encourage farmers to draw less water.
It is also aimed at making sure all farms get irrigated, not only
those owned by rich farmers.

Micro irrigation is spreading fast across Gujarat. Back in the Dolpur
farm of the Patel brothers, a modern drip irrigation system is at
work. They have had to pay the full price for it because they chose to
go in for micro irrigation before the subsidy scheme was set in
motion. The brothers bring scientific knowledge of soil, water and
weather to their farming practices. They have even built a small soil
and water analysis laboratory. “We know that while one well would
normally irrigate three to four acres, using newer automated
techniques, we could irrigate 15-20 acres,” says Jitesh Patel. The
modern systems have made sure that the four hours of power are plenty
for their large farm. “We sleep better, have saved on labour and also
on water,” he says adding, quite proudly, “We now enjoy a higher
status in society.”