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Twenty five years back, we launched a communications revolution, bypassing the land-based telephony technology. India jumped to move into a satellite based cellular Technology. Today, we have a mobile subscriber base of over one billion compared to 33 million land- based connections at its peak. The low cost of mobile telephony has enabled even the rural poor to take advantage. The same technological revolution, which jumps several stages at one time is required in agricultural sector if we desire to reach and even exceed our export targets..
In the recent past, with every VUCA event such as Covid-19, the most affected economy is rural. Not only migrant remittances dried, they returned home to put an additional pressure on household resources. Rural supply chains have taken a hit and the households further pushed into indebtedness. These setbacks are in addition to the usual cycle of flood and drought. This needs re-thinking.
In India, marginal farmers with less than two hectares of land account for 86.2% of all farmers, but own just 47.3% of the arable land, not enough to farm marketable surplus as well as contribute to exports. This is forcing jobless rural youths to migrate for income generation. Going forward the next decade, the indicators are that manufacturing jobs will decrease due to automation. We lost world markets in the labour intensive industries such as garments and leather, with consolation that jobs in service sector will increase, but largely at low-skilled levels such as online & food aggregators delivery force.