For agrarian distress, farm industry

Agriculture's share of India's GDP has fallen over time and will fall further from its current 13% contribution, says the author

If farm loan waivers were a solution to agrarian distress, India’s farmers would have achieved prosperity long ago. In reality, loan waivers are just an easy palliative, with plenty of good optics, for a political economy that has shied away from fundamental structural reform. Truth be told, the solution for agrarian distress does not lie in agriculture. It lies in industry. But as long as politics sees the requirements of industry, whether cheap land and power, plentiful labour and affordable capital as antithetical to the interests of India’s poor, it is bound to condemn those very people to continued poverty.