This drastic change in one sector – agriculture – is propelling the entire economy of the state.Here are some key drivers of agricultural growth in Madhya Pradesh and the lessons that the state holds for other large ones of India.
The farmers in MP have seen their cumulative income rise by 32 per cent in the past one year mainly due to diversification of farm activities to high value crops from cereals, and better road infrastructure.
This drastic change in one sector – agriculture – is propelling the entire economy of the state so much so that from the per capita net state domestic product of Rs 15,400 in 2004-05, MP finally breached the Rs 50,000 mark in 2014-15 at current prices, registering a three-and-a-half times higher growth on the key economic metric.
Given this tremendous record, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was asked to give a presentation during the governing council meet of NITI Aayog which was held recently. He presented a road map to achieve Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of doubling farmers’ income by 2022.
In his presentation, Chouhan mentioned five areas where the governments need to focus on: decreasing the cost of cultivation; increasing productivity, shift in farm activities towards high value crops; better prices for farm produce; and risk mitigation through a comprehensive system of insurance and timely compensation.
An excellent paper , authored by India’s preeminent agriculture scientist Ashok Gulati and his team came in handy for us to understand the key drivers of agricultural growth in Madhya Pradesh and the lessons that it holds for other major states of India with somewhat similar characteristics.
Diversification
Diversification from cereals and pulses towards high value crops, livestock and fisheries is one of the major factors behind the agricultural growth in MP. In the last five years alone, the state’s gross state domestic product (GSDP) in animal husbandry has grown from Rs 8,976 crore to Rs 33,751 crore and in fisheries from Rs 650 crore to 1,805 crore.
Apart from this, milk production recorded an increase from 6.4 million tonnes in 2006-07 to 10.8 million tonnes in 2014-15. Vegetable production increased from 3.6 million tonnes in 2010-11 to 14.2 million tonnes in 2013-14, taking the state from thirteenth to fourth place in vegetable production. Meat production tripled from 20,000 tonnes to 60,000 tonnes.
The following charts from the ICRIER paper illustrate the success of MP in diversifying farm produce.
Fruits and Vegetables
Milk production
Meat Production
Fish Production
Irrigation
Irrigation has played a pivotal role in scripting the spectacular success story of agriculture in the state. Gross irrigated area increased from a meager 4.3 million hectares in 2000-01 to an impressive 10.3 million hectares in 2014-15. In 2000-01, the irrigation ratio in MP was 24 per cent, was 17.2 percentage points lower than the all India average. By 2013-14, the ratio dramatically increased to 41.2 per cent, reducing the gap with the all India average to just 6.2 per cent, which is a pointer to impressive irrigation infrastructure the state has developed. By 2014-15, the irrigation ratio in MP reached 42.8 per cent.
The MP government managed to establish an impressive network of irrigation infrastructure comprising dug wells, tube wells, tanks/ponds and government canals, through a combination of public investment and incentivising private sector investment. Area covered under tube well irrigation increased from 0.9 million hectares in 2000-01 to 3.2 million hectares in 2013-14, dug wells from 1.9 million hectares to 3.3 million hectares, irrigation facilities though government canals increased from 0.9 million hectares in 2000-01 to 1.8 million hectares in 2013-14, and irrigation through tanks increased from 0.1 million hectares to 0.3 million hectares.
Electricity
The government made the following interventions to improve the electricity situation for agriculture use in the state:
- Ensured 24 hour power supply in the state, out of which eight hours was exclusively for agriculture purpose.
- Provided power to agriculture on a flat rate of Rs 1,200 per year, with the provision to pay in two installments.
- Provided separate rural feeders for agriculture; 43,517 villages have been provided with a separate feeder of 11 KW line comprising 71,688 Km and 1,516 transformers of 21 KW.
- Aggressively implementing Deen Dayal Upadhaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY) a centrally sponsored scheme, which was initiated in 2014 with separation of feeders for agricultural and non-agricultural consumers.
The share of agriculture in total power consumption in MP is around 33.7 per cent, which is much higher than the national average of 20.8 per cent and higher than in states like Karnataka (33.7 per cent), Punjab (30 per cent), Gujarat (23.6 per cent), and Maharashtra (22 per cent).
Roads
The third important factor that has contributed to agricultural growth was the building of all-weather roads. Road density in MP had increased from 526.8 per thousand sq km in 2000-01 to around 742.3 per thousand sq km in 2012-13.
The surfaced roads as a percentage of total roads have increased from 49 per cent to 68 per cent during same period. This enabled farmers to access markets over a larger area, and thereby reducing their market risk.
Procurement
Due to availability of better roads, more power and increased irrigation, the productivity of farms increased. This was especially true for wheat production as shown in the chart below. This was mainly because the state government gave a bonus of Rs 100 per quintal on the minimum support prices (MSP) for wheat over and above the centre’s MSP between 2007-08 and 2012-13 and Rs 150 per quintal in 2013-14 and 2014-15.
The result of this was that once a paltry contributor to the procurement pool, the state became the second largest contributor in just one decade.
However, this was achieved through various steps taken by the government.
- Compared to two other big contributors to wheat procurement pool, Haryana and Punjab, MP kept taxes on MSP low which meant private players bought more from MP than Haryana and Punjab.
- Unlike Haryana and Punjab, MP decentralised its procurement process. It chose to do procurement through co-operative societies instead of arhatiyas.
- More production meant more wheat started coming into mandis choking the roads. Manual payments to farmers was a slow and corruption-prone process. MP digitised the process through ‘e-Uparajan’ initiative with an aim to enable a smooth and efficient procurement.
- Increase in production and procurement meant that the state needed more storage facilities. It has greatly expanded its capacity. The government is also focusing on opening more cold storages for perishable produce.
Mechanisation and farm credit
Mechanisation enhances productivity. However, small land holdings have proved to be a lacuna in universalisation of mechanisation. To make it more affordable to small farmers, MP launched yantradoot scheme under which farmers can rent farm equipment instead of paying big buck to buy them. The government also encouraged youth to open custom hiring centres by giving subsidy and lucrative bank loans. The government has also provided some small equipment to farmers free of cost.
This has resulted in a spurt in use of agriculture machinery as the charts below show.
Non-availability of credit is a big problem for farmers. In 2012-13, MP launched a new loan scheme through state owned co-operative banks, bringing the interest rate from a high of 16-17 per cent in 2006-07 to zero. As a result, disbursement increased from Rs.33.3 billion in 2006-017 to Rs.112.1 billion in 2013-14.
Madhya Pradesh’s agriculture success story is a lesson worth learning for many states of India who are struggling to get their agriculture moving. The literally central state of India has many lessons which may prove central to the country’s agricultural story in the twenty-first century.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.