India needs rural model that focuses on income from non-farm sources: Chand

India needs a new rural development model that focuses on adequate income from non-farm sources for part-time farmers, especially those who are small and marginal.

This is because even in 2047, by when India aspires to become a developed nation, almost 50 per cent of the population will come from rural India, NITI Aayog member and eminent agriculture economist Ramesh Chand said.

"As on date, around one-third of the rural economy is based on agriculture while two-thirds of income comes from non-agriculture sources; therefore, our new rural development should look at part-time farmers, especially those who are small and marginal," Chand said while addressing an event in New Delhi where he launched 'RURAL WORLD' magazine, a sister publication of 'RURAL VOICE' (a website on rural India).

Chand said NITI Aayog is working on the new development model for India with the same focus on boosting incomes from the rural non-farm sector.

He said in other countries of the world which are growing at the pace at which India is growing, urbanisation has happened at a quicker pace.

But, in India, almost 64-65 per cent of the population still live in rural areas, while in Brazil just around 12-14 per cent of the population is in rural areas.

"Urbanisation is happening but at a very slow pace in India, also world over. When the share of agriculture goes down in the economy, people get jobs in the non-agriculture sector, which is not happening in India," Chand said.

He said the latest PLFS data of the last seven years show that the shift of the labour force from agriculture to industry has stopped. "The structural transformation is happening in output but not in employment," Chand said.

He said panchayats and other local bodies need to be adequately empowered, and special steps should be taken to stop the commercialisation of rural common properties.

Chand said that unlike the rest of the world, big farms could not emerge in Asia when urbanisation happened; so much so, our study shows that though 47 per cent of the small and marginal farmers are more efficient than big farmers, their land size is so small that they could not generate adequate incomes from the land.