Madhya Pradesh is a state where agriculture has done well over the last two decades, especially under Shivraj Singh Chouhan who may well be chief minister again after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s emphatic Assembly elections win defying earlier predictions.
During 2013-14 to 2022-23, MP’s farm sector registered an average annual growth of 6.1 per cent. That’s more than the national average of 3.9 per cent for these 10 years.
The extent of transformation that has marked Chouhan’s largely unbroken tenure as chief minister since the end of November 2005 — drawing comparisons with what Partap Singh Kairon accomplished in post-Independence Punjab — can be gauged by a few statistics.
Between 2004-05 and 2021-22, total agricultural land or net sown area (NSA) in MP has risen just 5.7 per cent, from 149.75 lakh to 158.23 lakh hectares (lh). But its gross cropped area (GCA) — from the same land being cultivated once or more than once in a year — has gone up by 48.7 per cent, from 202.03 lh to 300.49 lh. MP’s GCA is the highest for any state today; in 2004-05, it ranked fourth — behind Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.
The increase in GCA — translating into its average field growing 1.9 crops a year, almost as high as for Punjab and way above the all-India figure of 1.55 — has mainly to do with improved access to irrigation. Between 2004-05 and 2021-22, MP’s net irrigated area has more than doubled, from 60.42 lh to 129.03 lh.
Expansion in irrigation coverage — from just over 40 to 81.5 per cent — has been the Chouhan-led government’s most significant agricultural achievement. Much of it is courtesy of groundwater, with the outstanding power connections for irrigation tubewells soaring from 13.2 lakh to 32.5 lakh between 2010-11 and 2020-21 alone. Net area irrigated under canals, too, has nearly doubled during Chouhan’s tenure. That’s been partly due to new investments, but also the focus on completing unfinished last-mile projects and improving utilisation of existing irrigation potential, through concrete lining of canals and timely desilting, cleaning and fixing breaches before the cropping season.
The other key driver behind MP’s farm miracle story under Chouhan has been assured minimum support price (MSP) procurement, specifically of wheat. Till up to 2006-07, wheat procurement from MP rarely touched 0.5 million tonnes (mt). It changed with his government putting in place an effective procurement system, including online registration of farmers prior to the marketing season and informing them via SMS when to bring their crop to the mandis to avoid overcrowding. The procurement centres were set up even outside the primary APMC (agricultural produce market committee) yards — in sub-mandis, cooperative societies and warehouses closer to the villages. From the 2007-08 crop year, MP also began paying a Rs 100/quintal bonus in addition to the Centre’s MSP, which was enhanced to Rs 150 from 2012-13.
By 2011-12, procurement from MP had crossed 8.5 mt and the state soon overtook Haryana as the largest contributor to the Central pool after Punjab. Procurement rose further to 12.9 mt in 2019-20, which exceeded even Punjab’s 12.7 mt for that crop year. MP’s wheat production itself went up from 7.3 mt in 2004-05 to 19.6 mt in 2019-20 and an estimated 23 mt in 2021-22. According to Arvind Sardana, a Dewas-based former director of the non-profit Eklavya Foundation, MP’s decentralised procurement system benefitted even small farmers without resources for hiring tractor trolleys to take their wheat to APMC mandis. For these farmers, too, the MSP-derived mandi rates set the benchmark against which prices on sales to the village-level trader/aggregator were negotiated.
More recent schemes of the Chouhan government have been the Mukhya Mantri Kisan Kalyan Yojana (in which all farming families are being paid Rs 6,000, over and above the Rs 6,000 direct cash transfer under the Centre’s PM Kisan Samman Nidhi) and the Bhavantar Bhugtan Yojana. The latter scheme, to pay farmers the difference between the MSP and market price for crops other than wheat, was introduced in response to the agrarian distress post-demonetisation. However, it didn’t fully take off, thanks to the Centre’s lack of enthusiasm.
Chouhan’s real failure, though, has been in not being able to replicate his agricultural success story in other sectors, particularly manufacturing and modern services. The 6.1 per cent annual growth that MP’s farm sector has recorded during 2013-14 to 2022-23 is higher than the corresponding average increase of 5.6 per cent for industry and 5.8 per cent for the state’s overall gross value added (GVA). Agriculture had a 44.2 per cent share of MP’s GVA at current prices (the highest for any state and the national average of 18.4 per cent) and 59.8 per cent of its workforce (next only to Chhattisgarh’s 62.6 per cent and the 45.8 per cent of all-India) in 2022-23.
The surpluses generated from agriculture in MP, Sardana points out, are invested mostly in land/real estate, transport, warehouses, cold stores, tractors, farm input and vehicle dealerships, and other small businesses. This is unlike in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Maharashtra, where scores of people from predominantly farming communities such as Kamma, Naidu, Reddy, Raju, Gounder, Patidar and Maratha have made the transition from prosperous agriculturalists to businessmen-industrialists. MP’s not having a regional capitalist class with financial, political and entrepreneurial muscle has probably not helped either, condemning the state to being virtually locked into, and not going beyond, agriculture.
Chouhan’s story, to that extent, is different from even Kairon’s. Kairon, first as Punjab’s rehabilitation and development minister (1947-1956) and then as chief minister (1956-64), implemented land reforms through consolidation of fragmented and scattered holdings alongside imposition of a 12-hectare ceiling. He also oversaw the building of the Bhakra Nangal dam, and the establishment of the Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana. These laid the foundations for the Green Revolution that followed.
Less appreciated is Kairon’s role in Punjab’s industrialisation — whether through the fertiliser plant at Nangal and Hindustan Machine Tools factory at Pinjore or industrial estates at Ludhiana, Phagwara, Moga, Jalandhar, Batala and Amritsar. He also invited private industrialists, from the Munjals and Pahwas to Oswals, to invest in the state. The suave Michigan and Berkeley-educated Kairon understood that Punjab’s future couldn’t be in agriculture alone.
Kairon left behind a state that was fairly industrialised and No. 1 in per capita net state domestic product till well into the nineties. In 2021-22, it ranked 18th among India’s 33 states. Punjab’s industrial decline and being locked into agriculture happened only from the nineties. Diversifying beyond agriculture is a challenge the next government in MP – whether under Chouhan or anybody else – has to address.
harish.damodaran@expressindia.com
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