Jyoti Basu's agrarian legacy
Harish Damodaran
Among the notable accomplishments of the ruling Left Front in West Bengal under Jyoti Basu's stewardship, the turnaround in the State's agricultural fortunes occupies a very high slot. For all its perceived failures in other spheres, this is an achievement even the regime's critics — both from the Left and the Right — might acknowledge, howsoever grudgingly.
West Bengal today is India's No. 1 producer of rice, vegetables, fish and even pineapple, litchi and cut-flowers (see Table). It was nothing like this when Jyoti Basu first became Chief Minister in June 1977. The State's rice output was then languishing at 6-7 million tonnes (mt). During the 1980s, it crossed 10 mt and, by the subsequent decade, had reached the present levels of 14.5-15 mt.
The 1990s also saw the rice story being extended to horticulture (particularly vegetables) and fisheries.
Between 1991-92 and 2007-08, while India's vegetable production more than doubled from 58.53 mt to 125.89 mt, West Bengal's jumped almost five times, from 4.68 mt to 22.46 mt. And the vegetable basket expanded beyond potatoes to brinjal, cabbage, cauliflower and okra (lady's finger).
The other segment that registered impressive growth was inland aquaculture, where the State's production, since the early 1990s, rose from less than 0.6 mt to 1.3 mt. How much credit for all this goes to the ruling dispensation?
One could argue, for instance, that the success in rice was largely courtesy the new high-yielding varieties (HVY) and private tube-well irrigation. The diffusion of both these technologies (hitherto confined to north-western India) reached their apogee in the 1980s.
The Left Front was lucky enough to be in power when it all ‘happened'.
Empowering the tiller
The step-up in the State's farm sector growth — from an average 0.7 per cent per annum in 1970-83 to 5.4 per cent over 1983-1995 — was, going by this logic, a matter of fortuitous coincidence. But then, technology does not operate in an institutional vacuum, independent of human agency. The analysis, moreover, ignores the role of incentives, which even neoclassical economic theory emphasises.
West Bengal's agricultural transformation was, at the same time, not the product of the usual ‘market' and ‘state' forces. There were no aggressive seed companies those days to push the HYVs. The State's farmers, unlike their counterparts in Punjab and Haryana, did not also benefit from significant Central investments in irrigation, rural electrification, roads, farm extension, input supply and mandi infrastructure.
The impetus to Bengal's Green Revolution came, really, from two major institutional reforms.
The first was Operation Barga, a programme that gave some 1.5 million sharecroppers or bargadars permanent use rights on the land tilled by them. Besides conferring them legal protection against eviction by landlords, the officially recorded bargadars were guaranteed three-fourths share of the crop value, alongside access to institutional credit. That was incentive enough for cultivators to invest more in their crop and in the land they tilled.
The second, complementary, initiative involved devolution of powers to village and block-level panchayats. It is these local bodies that did the job of identifying and registering individual bargadars, apart from arranging credit for sinking of tube-wells and purchase of fertilisers and HYV seeds. Further, there is evidence corroborating their role in the development of water markets. That included establishing norms and protocols for pricing and sale of water by tube-well owners to the poorer peasants.
Party as State
Needless to say, the panchayats were predominantly CPI(M)-controlled, to the point where the party machinery effectively became the ‘state'. But this was a state that seemingly delivered — at least on the agrarian front, even if the primary motive may have been to cultivate a captive rural vote bank.
Paddy yields, which ruled below two tonnes a hectare till the early 1980s, since climbed to 3.7-3.8 tonnes. Improved irrigation access led to the proportion of the State's arable area cropped more than once a year going up from 40 per cent to 80 per cent — way above the all-India average cropping intensity of 135 per cent and on par with Punjab's 190 per cent. The above process has, nevertheless, not been without limitations.
The last 10 years or so have witnessed a virtual plateauing of production as well as yields in rice, for one. West Bengal's rice revolution during Jyoti Basu's tenure was, in no small way, driven by its farmers raising a second, highly-productive boro winter crop, following the regular post-monsoon kharif paddy. That, in turn, was made feasible through irrigation by shallow tube-wells, mainly powered by diesel.
Recent studies, however, show a decline in boro cultivation in districts such as Birbhum and Murshidabad, with soaring diesel prices prompting farmers to switch over to vegetables and other high-value crops. The situation has not been helped by the State Government's under-investment in rural electrification, the effects of which were not felt when diesel was relatively cheap.
West Bengal has also not succeeded in making the transition to food-processing, to add value to the farmers' raw produce and further boost rural incomes. The State Government's naïve faith in the McKinseys and the Pepsis (rather than a Verghese Kurien) to do the trick is partially to blame here.
Preserving Jyoti Basu's agrarian legacy would require a substantial step-up in rural infrastructure investments, for which the Centre has an equal part to play, as it did during the early Green Revolution phase in Punjab and Haryana.
That, of course, calls for a shedding of partisan politics. Whether one likes it or not, the key to the country's future food security lies in Eastern India, because that's where all the water is.
The Hindu Business Line
Harish Damodaran
Among the notable accomplishments of the ruling Left Front in West Bengal under Jyoti Basu's stewardship, the turnaround in the State's agricultural fortunes occupies a very high slot. For all its perceived failures in other spheres, this is an achievement even the regime's critics — both from the Left and the Right — might acknowledge, howsoever grudgingly.
West Bengal today is India's No. 1 producer of rice, vegetables, fish and even pineapple, litchi and cut-flowers (see Table). It was nothing like this when Jyoti Basu first became Chief Minister in June 1977. The State's rice output was then languishing at 6-7 million tonnes (mt). During the 1980s, it crossed 10 mt and, by the subsequent decade, had reached the present levels of 14.5-15 mt.
The 1990s also saw the rice story being extended to horticulture (particularly vegetables) and fisheries.
Between 1991-92 and 2007-08, while India's vegetable production more than doubled from 58.53 mt to 125.89 mt, West Bengal's jumped almost five times, from 4.68 mt to 22.46 mt. And the vegetable basket expanded beyond potatoes to brinjal, cabbage, cauliflower and okra (lady's finger).
The other segment that registered impressive growth was inland aquaculture, where the State's production, since the early 1990s, rose from less than 0.6 mt to 1.3 mt. How much credit for all this goes to the ruling dispensation?
One could argue, for instance, that the success in rice was largely courtesy the new high-yielding varieties (HVY) and private tube-well irrigation. The diffusion of both these technologies (hitherto confined to north-western India) reached their apogee in the 1980s.
The Left Front was lucky enough to be in power when it all ‘happened'.
Empowering the tiller
The step-up in the State's farm sector growth — from an average 0.7 per cent per annum in 1970-83 to 5.4 per cent over 1983-1995 — was, going by this logic, a matter of fortuitous coincidence. But then, technology does not operate in an institutional vacuum, independent of human agency. The analysis, moreover, ignores the role of incentives, which even neoclassical economic theory emphasises.
West Bengal's agricultural transformation was, at the same time, not the product of the usual ‘market' and ‘state' forces. There were no aggressive seed companies those days to push the HYVs. The State's farmers, unlike their counterparts in Punjab and Haryana, did not also benefit from significant Central investments in irrigation, rural electrification, roads, farm extension, input supply and mandi infrastructure.
The impetus to Bengal's Green Revolution came, really, from two major institutional reforms.
The first was Operation Barga, a programme that gave some 1.5 million sharecroppers or bargadars permanent use rights on the land tilled by them. Besides conferring them legal protection against eviction by landlords, the officially recorded bargadars were guaranteed three-fourths share of the crop value, alongside access to institutional credit. That was incentive enough for cultivators to invest more in their crop and in the land they tilled.
The second, complementary, initiative involved devolution of powers to village and block-level panchayats. It is these local bodies that did the job of identifying and registering individual bargadars, apart from arranging credit for sinking of tube-wells and purchase of fertilisers and HYV seeds. Further, there is evidence corroborating their role in the development of water markets. That included establishing norms and protocols for pricing and sale of water by tube-well owners to the poorer peasants.
Party as State
Needless to say, the panchayats were predominantly CPI(M)-controlled, to the point where the party machinery effectively became the ‘state'. But this was a state that seemingly delivered — at least on the agrarian front, even if the primary motive may have been to cultivate a captive rural vote bank.
Paddy yields, which ruled below two tonnes a hectare till the early 1980s, since climbed to 3.7-3.8 tonnes. Improved irrigation access led to the proportion of the State's arable area cropped more than once a year going up from 40 per cent to 80 per cent — way above the all-India average cropping intensity of 135 per cent and on par with Punjab's 190 per cent. The above process has, nevertheless, not been without limitations.
The last 10 years or so have witnessed a virtual plateauing of production as well as yields in rice, for one. West Bengal's rice revolution during Jyoti Basu's tenure was, in no small way, driven by its farmers raising a second, highly-productive boro winter crop, following the regular post-monsoon kharif paddy. That, in turn, was made feasible through irrigation by shallow tube-wells, mainly powered by diesel.
Recent studies, however, show a decline in boro cultivation in districts such as Birbhum and Murshidabad, with soaring diesel prices prompting farmers to switch over to vegetables and other high-value crops. The situation has not been helped by the State Government's under-investment in rural electrification, the effects of which were not felt when diesel was relatively cheap.
West Bengal has also not succeeded in making the transition to food-processing, to add value to the farmers' raw produce and further boost rural incomes. The State Government's naïve faith in the McKinseys and the Pepsis (rather than a Verghese Kurien) to do the trick is partially to blame here.
Preserving Jyoti Basu's agrarian legacy would require a substantial step-up in rural infrastructure investments, for which the Centre has an equal part to play, as it did during the early Green Revolution phase in Punjab and Haryana.
That, of course, calls for a shedding of partisan politics. Whether one likes it or not, the key to the country's future food security lies in Eastern India, because that's where all the water is.
The Hindu Business Line
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