When will farmers earn as much as the lowliest government employee?

In a superb piece, BL says

Successive governments at the Centre and the States have tried their hand at reducing the cost of cultivation. Most States supply electricity either free or at highly subsidised tariffs; urea fertiliser is made available at a substantial discount and now banks are being arm-twisted to offer credit at rates below what they charge other customers. Yet even if these inputs were available free, the yield from the farm would be far from princely. Besides, there is a cost to hiring labour and that is not coming any cheaper.

If Sasidharan's family had instead been on dry land — almost 50 per cent of the 141 million hectares of cultivated land in the country is not irrigated — growing coarse cereal, it would have needed a holding in excess of 15 hectares to earn a net income equal to his current salary at Saint Gobain. But such farmers would be rare. Just 1.2 per cent of land holdings in the country exceed 10 hectares each. In contrast, the average farm size in the US was 197 hectares in 1997.

Nine out the every ten farmers (the total number of cultivators is now about 12 crore) will need to give up their land and look at other professions if the farm holdings are to be consolidated into viable sizes of at least 10 hectares each.

That is what has happened in the US, where just 2 per cent of the population now works on the farm as against 21 per cent in 1930 and 41 per cent in 1900.

The spread of education is providing people such as Sasidharan and Nandakumar the passport to an alternative, and far more remunerative vocation. But to transform the lives of more than 10 crore farmers and as many farm workers is a mind-boggling challenge for society, of creating employment opportunities in the services and industrial sector, of managing the shift of workers from the farm — farm labour is already difficult to find in many States at the current wages — and of equipping farm family members with the skills that would fit them in industry and services. Are we ready for it?

I liked even the heading!