8 highlights
-
42% is also the single most important statistic in Indian agriculture, the percentage of the Indian labour force employed on farms. Advanced nations now have that number down to 2 or 3%. In England, home to the Industrial Revolution, the share of labour in agriculture was already down to 32% by 1800.
-
As people move from the farm to the city, the land per rural inhabitant goes up, farms become more mechanised, productivity goes up, and so does agricultural income. In contrast, our farms are small, poorly mechanised, and yield much lower crops per unit of land.
-
One of the new farm laws intended that farmers would no longer have to sell their crops to APMCs (Agricultural Produce Market Committees). To advocates of free markets, like myself, this would seem to be a good thing - farmers can sell to the best bidder, rather than to a closed circle of APMC traders. Bihar did away with the APMC Act in 2006. Research by the NCAER (National Center for Applied Economic Research ) and the University of Pennsylvania showed that, as a result, the number of agricultural markets dropped, farmer income dropped, and farmers living far from markets suffered the most. Reality proved to be quite different from what I would have expected. In other states, with large crop outputs, the outcome could quite well be different.
-
This leads me to two conclusions. The first is that agricultural marketing policy must be carefully crafted, taking into account climate, land holdings and cropping patterns in each region. This is exactly what was envisaged by the constitution, which gave individual states the responsibility for agricultural laws.
-
More importantly, I don’t see any way in which farming can support nearly half of India’s population at a respectable level of income and consumption. In the 1980s, the World Bank had said of Indian agriculture that its prosperity depended on the growth of jobs outside of agriculture.
-
To the uninformed, cars are not for driving. And crypto is not for payment.
-
Indian papers report that the laws will allow crypto-currencies to be used as assets, but not as currency. Meaning, you can speculate in Bitcoin, but you can’t put it to use.
-
when an IPO does well, you don’t get many shares