A Village is a Place
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In Today’s Edition:
1/ A Village is a Place
Long-time ABM Member Shrey Deb summarized Sameer Shisodia’s thoughts (with whom I had a powerful dialogue on “A Study on Agriculture as if Climate Change Mattered”) on the fundamentals of Agriculture and Sustainability in the RITH 2.0 event.
It was music to my ears. Why aren’t more people talking about this? Why do we implicitly assume a village to be a factory solely responsible for feeding some faraway place? Why do we fail to see that a village is a place?
A village is a place, not just meant for growing crops. It has always had ponds, livestock, crops and multiple other sources of livelihoods. The people there are not just farmers but usually have multiple livelihoods and sources of income. This is often overlooked.
Climate is just a by-product of our choices as a society and economy. E.g. we purchase mustard seeds from Deoria, process it in Rajasthan and then sell it in Lucknow. Do we understand the financial, environmental, time and product quality loss incurred in making this choice?
On food security and farming practices - how do we define food security? Is this nutrition or just calories? In the name of food security, we have reduced nutritional output from farms (due to lack of diversity) and also put at risk the incomes of farmers due to climate change.
Finally - whose problems are we addressing? Are we creating solutions to our questions or those being asked by the people in villages? Shouldn't we be creating options for people to choose what they want to do with their land and livelihoods?
There is enough evidence that people want change, there are enough examples of farmers using Youtube to carry out experiments on their own whenever they can. Let's give them options and let them choose for themselves. Let's stop using the term 'interventions' and just respond to different questions, delivering solutions based on the context.
2/ Seven Data-driven Insights from the recent NABARD All India Rural Financial Inclusion Survey 2021-22
What does a survey of 100,000 rural households, living in Tier-3 to Tier-6 centres of the country, spanning all States and two Union Territories and 710 districts reveal about the state of financial inclusion in rural India?
In a country like India, credible primary data is as scarce as Mackenna’s Gold and this survey done after 2016-17 is important for one big reason: It reveals how rural India was affected by the pandemic during 2021-22.
Insight #1: The average monthly household income of farmers increased from Rs 8,059 (~95.75 USD) in 2016-17 to Rs 12,698 (~150 USD) in 2021-22, reflecting a 57.6 per cent rise.
Nuance: As I’ve written before, Cultivation incomes continue to remain one-third of the income (₹13,661// ~161 USD) in an agricultural household, followed by govt/private service and wage labour and livestock rearing. All the more reasons for us to treat a village as a place and not a factory to grow food.
*Agricultural Households are households that reported a value of produce of more than Rs.6,500/- (~77 USD) from agriculture & allied activities and having at least one member self-employed in agriculture during the reference Agricultural Year 2021-22.Insight #2: 52.2% of households have outstanding debt, with an average outstanding debt of ₹90,372 (~1073 USD) per indebted household. 74.4% of loans are from institutional sources. The proportion of rural households that reported outstanding debt has grown from 47.4 per cent in 2016-17 to 52.0 per cent in 2021-22, even as their average monthly income jumped 57.5 per cent in the same period.
Nuance: Larger landholders have better access to credit. Marginal farmers continue to rely on non-agricultural income sources while leveraging higher-interest informal loans. While larger landholdings generally correlate with higher debt amounts, the proportion of indebted households doesn't follow the same linear trend. It’s interesting to see mid-sized farmers seem more vulnerable to indebtedness
Insight #3: The percentage of households with at least one member covered by any form of insurance increased significantly from 25.5% in 2016-17 to 80.3% in 2021-22. Crop Insurance and Animal Insurance penetration stands at 10% and 2.1 % respectively.
Nuance: The low penetration of crop and animal insurance perhaps shows the potential for agri-insurtech players to offer bespoke insurance packages based on the cropping patterns provided they can bundle agritech solutions with insurance packages for non-loanee farmers.