India: In need of a second Green Revolution.

India is today a nation of 1.1 billion people, 1.1 billion mouths to feed. India has gone through many phases in its struggle for food security after independence.
The world's worst recorded food disaster happened in 1943 in British ruled India. Known as the Bengal famine, an estimated 4 million people died of hunger that year along in eastern India. Even after independence there wasn't much change in the situation. During the 1960's India's trade was defined by the ship-to-mouth of food grains.
Then came the phase of green revolution (1967-68 to 1977-78) envisaged by the legendary M.S. Swaminathan. It is considered as one of the cornerstones of India’s march towards being self sufficient and being a leading agricultural nation.
However, lack of proper attention, growing corruption, increase in economic clout of middlemen and global market environment has rendered this great revolution obsolete. This stagnation in the sector has been due to the slowdown in agricultural investment, lack of planning in public irrigation, water management, storage and marketing and decline in public (technological) extension services.
India and the world at large today are facing a crunch in food supply. The demand constraints due to an alarming rate of population growth are the major factor that led to this present situation. The issue becomes more complex due to the diversion of land for bio fuels. It is for the first time that the price of oil and food has come to directly affect each other. More and more people have been pushed to consider use of non-edible oils and other bio fuels along with petrol and diesel to counter the rising price of oil. Now, more and more bio fuels are being generated from edible farm products like corn and sugarcane. Moreover, the western countries, due to their high consumption and demand of fuels are subsidising farmers to grow crops for energy.
Rising food prices and decay of the agricultural sector pose a very serious threat to the whole country. It slows down the process of poverty alleviation, impedes economic growth and retards employment generation. We as a country definitely cannot return to the era of blind controls for restricting trade practices and depressing terms of trade in order to safeguard the economy from the global turbulence. That would only hurt the welfare of the farmers as well as long term growth off the economy.
To add to this, the agricultural sector hasn't seen much development in terms of its stability. Sixty years of planning has still left the Indian farmer at the mercy of the monsoons.
The first green revolution has run its course. It’s time for new policies, new technologies, better organisational structure and institutional responses. We need to frame creative and imaginative solutions for increasing productivity, increasing farmers' income and food production and greater purchasing power in the hands of the poor.
The major challenge is to make farming viable at small scale, otherwise it would be virtually impossible to reduce rural poverty and distress. One form of solving this problem would be collectivisation, corporatisation and consolidation. It is essential that we educate the rural population about the advantages of working together in terms of procurement, production and marketing. Collective effort by the small scale farmers would help in achieving economies of scale and better bargaining power for these communities.
Advances in new technology and related progress also play a major role. It is necessary to evolve technologies that make cultivation of crops by marginal and small scale farmers viable. In addition, we should try to put in place systems and institutional backup that helps such farmers achieve economies of scale in other farming operations such as provision of farm inputs, credit and marketing support.
Hence, the need of the hour is to combine economics of small farms with economics of mass production and modern marketing. We need to work on institution building, capacity building and empowering farmers through investing in their capabilities.
We require firm political commitment on a sustained basis as what we saw in the 1960 and 1970s during the Green Revolution; not election chasing sound bytes of commitment to agriculture sector and debt waivers as we are witnessing currently. It is essential to create new compact between the farmers, traders and consumers.
Overall, it is essential to that we bring about development that is inclusive, equitable and environmentally sustainable. This can be attained only through livelihood security and food security for the entire nation ...every one of that 1.1 billion.