Topmost Action Point In India’s Exit From Covid-19 Lockdown: Its Farming

In some hours, we will get to know the next course of India’s self-imposed lockdown to protect itself from the Covid-19 pandemic. For more than three weeks, the lockdown brought to a standstill all economic activity in the country much like more than 100 other countries that have imposed the Covid-19 lockdown. But like any other country, for India too, the lockdown couldn’t have been an indefinite remedy to the Covid-19 malady. In the last 2-3 days, there have been plenty of media reports about how the staggered exit from the lockdown is likely to take place. Clearly, apart from surviving the virus, a country like India, where millions live on the margins, needs to quickly try and kickstart, what seems like a very long journey back to economic normalcy.

This is also coming at a time when some European countries have started to loosen up the lockdown conditions. Spain has announced that it has started relaxing the lockdown conditions, Denmark and Norway did it over the weekend. There has been a lot of talk about the sectors in India that need to be given the preference to restart their operations, albeit in a small scale. Interestingly, there is very little or no discussion about farming. To me, in case of a relaxation of the lockdown in districts without any Covid-19 case or threat, it is farming and activities related to it, that should get top most priority as this sector makes the most compelling case for relaxation.

Coming on the back of a period of broadly stagnating income, most farmers find themselves with good standing crops yet to be harvested. In some cases, this is the only crop for the year. Mess with this and you add to major mess created by the massive numbers of already unemployed migrant workers. To give you a sense of the numbers involved we are probably talking of more than 550 million who depend directly or indirectly on agriculture.

Not that just relaxing farm activities from the purview of the lockdown will be a silver bullet. Farmers are going to struggle to find agricultural workers where they are typically employed. There will also be the issue of supply of important machinery like harvesters which will be available in smaller-than-required numbers and will also need to negotiate border blockages across the country.

If the challenge of timely harvesting wasn’t daunting enough, the produce needs to be procured in the markets where social distancing norms and lack of manpower will again be an impediment. The Indian media has covered very little of the distress in the countryside. To get a sense of what the Covid-19 pandemic can do to agri economy on needs to look at the distressing footages of farmers throwing away their agri and dairy produce in countries like the US.

Clearly, supply of free foodgrains to the rural areas regardless of whether families and individuals have ration cards and other requirements, saving farmers from payouts like interest payments in times of income loss and restart their income flow with direct agri produce procurement, have to be among the critical points in any economic revival strategy in early part of the post-lockdown period. There hasn’t been much discussion on agri-related distress from Covid-19 lockdown because other sectors have been more vocal and typically get sympathetic ears. But make no mistake, if India is to record any kind of economic growth rate in 2020-21 after COVID-19 outbreak, agriculture may just about the best if not the only bet.