The paradox is a pointer to the effectiveness of half a century of state-sponsored agricultural and rural development in offering viable livelihoods to 70 per cent of Indians living in rural areas.

The high farmer suicide rates reported from Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in recent years are, ironically, a testimony to the victims’ determination to escape the quagmire of livelihood desperation that is the lot of the average resident of Village India . Taking business risks that no urban entrepreneur would, these farmers found themselves at the mercy of market forces over which they had no control with little or no institutional support.

India’s poverty reduction model

As governments rush to hand out financial compensation to affected families, it is pertinent to ask if equal priority is being given to removing the root cause of farmer suicides. While developing Asian nations that once suffered similar levels of rural distress, have moved leagues ahead in raising living standards of their people, India still adheres to a poverty reduction model based on politically convenient and ever bigger financial sops that only make it more difficult for nearly half a billion rural Indians to break out of the poverty trap.

The latest manifestation is the high-profile rural job guarantee scheme, which has reportedly fallen prey to the abuse and manipulation to which all official anti-poverty programmes seem prone. But instead of debating whether the national rural employment guarantee programme (NREGP) can be made to work transparently, it is more to the point to ask if rural people should be dependent on state-doled work for ever rather than being helped to stand on their own feet.

Of course, the victims of decades of rural neglect desperately need the safety net of the NREGP. But can it help kick start economically productive activities in the countryside and keep villagers from taking the road to the city?

Taking the road to the city

The 2001 Census found 21 million rural people had migrated to urban areas since the preceding headcount. A “Goldman Sachs” study estimates that on average, 31 rural people show up in an Indian city every minute, most of them in search of basic needs unavailable in the countryside.

Agriculture is the main rural job creator but access to its most basic productive asset is highly skewed. Eighty per cent of the 127.3 million rural cultivators own less than two hectares of land while another 106.7 million have none. India ’s main employment engine, farming absorbs two-thirds of the national workforce but its share of the national income pie has shrunk substantially over the decades.

Population growth and environmental degradation are diminishing the supply of cultivable land, reducing rural work opportunities. The National Commission on Farmers (NCF) estimates that farm jobs grew by just 0.2 percent between 1993 and 2000.

Census data show that 30 million rural families have at least one member seeking work. Nearly five million rural families have no regular breadwinner and another 13 million village households are supported by family members who work for less than six months a year.

A United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation study links declining farm productivity in India since the 1990s to diminishing public investment on agricultural research, technology and infrastructure. Indian government expenditure on the sector per farm worker during this period has been the lowest in South Asia and even less than in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This is all the more strange since farms of less than 2 ha covering just a third of total cultivated land produced 41 per cent of the nation’s food in the 1990s.

While agricultural growth has stagnated, India ’s post-1990 economic liberalisation boom has not benefited the rural poor, unlike in China where the rural industrial transformation of the 1980s and 1990s, successfully absorbed 100 million workers from the agriculture sector.

Nearly a quarter million town and village enterprises (TVEs) account for a third of China ’s GDP and 40 percent of exports. It is vital to boost small farm productivity, but more important to create non-farm rural jobs, says the NCF.

Ideologies of the left or right should be subservient to the primary goal of helping the rural poor. Rural India needs corporate India not to set up special economic zones that are also opposed by the NCF, but for skills development and work opportunities in village-based low-tech enterprises that produce goods and services meeting basic rural needs.

Rural business hubs

The NCF advocates rural business hubs on the line of Chinese TVEs. The Ministry of Rural Development has initiated efforts to bring about a partnership between Panchayati Raj institutions and Corporate India.

Although, China’s rural industrialisation required a unique combination of political and economic factors incapable of being replicated here, India’s small rural producers have shown by their contribution to national food production that they can be as dynamic entrepreneurs as their urban counterparts and are only waiting for the right conditions in the form of appropriate skills training, technologies, access to credit and markets.

(The writer is a FAO consultant based in Bangkok)