Ardent promoters of organic farming consider that present day organic agriculture, which is a mix of traditional wisdom and modern science, can herald the complete development of rural areas, especially in developing countries like India where the large chunk of farmers are small, with minimal resources and limited access to water. As per the International Federation for Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) “Organic agriculture is a production system that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people; combines tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared environment and promote fair relationships and a good quality of life for all involved”. Organic agriculture is thus based on four principles:
Principle of health: It should sustain and enhance the health of soil, plant, animal, human and planet as one and indivisible.
Principle of ecology: It should be based on living ecological systems and cycles, work with them, emulate them and help sustain them.
Principle of fairness: It should build on relationships that ensure fairness with regard to the common environment and life opportunities.
Principle of care: It should be managed in a precautionary and responsible manner to protect the health and well-being of current and future generations.
The World of Organic Agriculture: According to latest FiBL-IFOAM survey by H Willer, et al., 2013, ‘The World of Organic Agriculture: Statistics and Emerging Trends’, organic agriculture is being practiced on 37.2 mha in 162 countries (0.9 per cent of total agricultural land). Apart from agricultural land, there are further organic areas, most of these being areas of wild collection—aquaculture, forests, and grazing areas on nonagricultural land. They constitute 32.5 mha. In total, 69.7 mha (agricultural and non-agricultural areas) are organic. There were 1.8 million producers in 2011. Thirty-four per cent of the world’s organic producers are in Asia, followed by Africa (30 per cent), and Europe (16 per cent). The countries with the most farmers are India (547591, 2012), Uganda (188625, 2010), and Mexico (169570, 2010) (ibid.). Organic food and beverage market was worth 63 billion US dollars in 2011. Demand for organic products is mainly in North America and Europe; these two regions comprise more than 90 per cent of sales with US being the single largest market.
Organic Agriculture in India: By March 2012, India had brought approximately 5.56 mha land under organic certification process with major share of 4.48 mha under wild harvest collection in forests and 1.08 mha under regular cultivation, spread over almost all states and union territories. In all 5.47 lakh farmers and wild collectors have produced approximately 2.8 mt of more than 250 organic commodities valued at Rs. 5000 crores. Organic cotton and its value added products, basmati rice, soybean, sugar, tea, honey, spices and dry fruits are important categories being exported to other countries. During the year 2011, India was the second largest exporter of organic tea, after China, 6th largest exporter of organic soybeans and 7th largest exporter of organic sugar.
Organic Agriculture and Productivity: Since the advent of organic farming in the recent years there had been concerns on the production potential of the system. But the results of long term experiments released during the last 10 years from world over have proved otherwise. In irrigated conditions organic farming may be yielding 5 to 12 per cent less than their conventional counterparts but under rain-fed and water deficit conditions organic system yields 7 to 15 per cent more.
Six years of experimenting, comparing two models of organic management with only-chemical and chemical-and-organic combination under 4 crop husbandry systems was undertaken at International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). The study titled ‘Evaluation of crop production systems using locally available biological inputs’, by O P Rupela, et al. in 2006, published in Biological Approaches to Sustainable Soil Systems, revealed that although, maximisation of yields can be achieved by the combined use of chemical fertilisers and organic inputs/practices (integrated agriculture), but this combination may not be affordable for small and marginal farmers in rain-fed areas (Fig. 1 and 2).
The low cost organic approaches can be an attractive choice, particularly when their strategic application results in yield levels at par with conventional system. The two organic models studied in the experiment yielded comparable results, and were in fact 25 per cent more profitable than the conventional system. Pest and disease management was also effective and low cost with biological approaches. Soil fertility and soil nutrient balance was certainly on a significantly higher side in organic system and offer longer sustainability under Indian conditions, typical of small and marginal farmers.
Reviewing 154 growing seasons’ worth of data (B Halweil, 2006, ‘Can Organic Farming Feed Us All?’, World Watch Magazine) on various crops grown on rain-fed and irrigated land in the United States, University of California, agricultural scientist Bill Liebhardt found that organic corn yields were 94 per cent of conventional yields, organic wheat yields were 97 per cent, and organic soybean yields were 94 per cent. Organic tomatoes showed no yield difference. More importantly, in the poorer nations where most of the world’s hungry live, the yield gaps completely disappear. University of Essex researchers Jules Pretty and Rachel Hine looked at over 200 agricultural projects in the developing world that converted to organic and ecological approaches, and found that for all the projects—involving 9 million farms on nearly 30 mha, yields increased an average of 93 per cent.
A seven-year study from Maikaal project in Khargone District in central India (J Frank et al., 2009, ‘The Impact of Organic Cotton Farming on the Livelihoods of Smallholders – Evidence from the Maikaal bioRe project in Central India’, Organic Farming Newsletter) involving 1,000 farmers, cultivating 3,200 hectares found that average yields for cotton, wheat, chili, and soybean were as much as 20 per cent higher on the organic farms than on nearby conventionally managed ones. Farmers and agricultural scientists ascribed the higher yields in the dry region to the emphasis on cover crops, compost, manure, and other practices that increased organic matter, helping the retention of water in the soils apart from providing adequate nutrients.
Organic Agriculture and Profitability: Recently a study was conducted in Maharashtra to assess the impact of organic farming on economics of sugarcane cultivation in Maharashtra (K G Kshirsagar, 2007, ‘Impact of Organic Sugarcane Farming on Economics and Water Use Efficiency in Maharashtra’, Artha Vijnana). The research was based on primary data collected from two districts covering 142 farmers, 72 growing organic sugarcane and 70 growing inorganic sugarcane. The study found that organic cultivation enhances human labour employment by 16.9 per cent and cost of cultivation is lower by 14.24 per cent as compared to conventional farming. Although the yield from the organic crop was 6.79 per cent lower than the conventional crop, it was more than compensated by the price premium received and yield stability observed on organic farms.
In a paper by Tej Pratap et al., 2009, titled ‘Organic Farmers Speak on Economics and Beyond’, Westville Publishing House; based on a nationwide survey of organic farmers indicates favourable economics through a cost-benefit analysis. Farmers in 5 out of 7 states are better placed so far as organic farming is concerned. The returns are higher in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. In Karnataka organic farmers had 4-35 per cent higher returns. In Kerala the differentials ranged between 4-37 per cent in favour of inorganic farmers. In Maharashtra the difference in net profit was more than 100 per cent in case of soybean. Cotton farmers were enjoying a comfortable profit margin. The profit differential in Rajasthan ranged from 12-59 per cent in favour of organic farmers. In another study by Ramesh et al., 2010, ‘Status of organic farming in India: Productivity vs Profitability’, Current Science; it has been reported that, although the productivity of crops in organic farming is lower by 9.2 per cent compared to conventional farming, there was a significant reduction in the average cost of cultivation by 11.7 per cent compared to conventional farming.
Conventionalisation of Organic agriculture: Since its re-emergence during the last decade of the twentieth century, organic agriculture was promoted as a self generating and self sustaining enterprise with total reliance on on-farm resources coupled with practices like crop rotations, inter-cropping, multi-cropping, integration of legumes in cropping systems and integration of cattle. But of late, in its quest to compete with the conventional agriculture in terms of productivity and to make the practices relevant to present day scenario, the system has started accepting the importance of off-farm inputs and use of industry produced inputs in the form of commercially produced composts, biostimulants, botanical extracts, biofertilisers and biopesticides etc. To cater to the growing demand, a new set of organic input industry has started to grow. The trend might have added to the acceptability of the system by farmers and policy makers, but it is a matter of concern for the original promoters of the organic, in whose wisdom it is a natural cycles based, natural resource dependent and self generating production enterprise.
Ardent promoters of organic farming term it as conventionalisation of organic agriculture and caution that with such developments, organic farming may transform into a slightly modified version of modern conventional agriculture, replicating the same history, resulting in many of the same social, technical and economic ills. Conventionalisation of organic farming is now increasingly seen as problematic, since organic farming has received public support for its potential to contribute to environmental protection and rural development. However, if organic farming increasingly comes to resemble conventional farming and this potential contribution is jeopardised, organic farming may lose the support it currently receives from both consumers and policy makers.
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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.