New agriculture model for India

For quite a long time, farming community in India is facing lot of hardships for lack of modern and scientific agriculture practices, money supply, loans, credit issues, suicides, crop damages and product rejections due to traces of pesticides. At the same time, Governments are burdened with issues connected with agricultural loans, crop damages and farmers unrest. Bankers are troubled with individual farming loans and repayment problems. Overall agriculture in India is always at the threshold of crisis.

At the same time, most of the Indian farmers are employing unscientific methods in Agriculture with the use of excessive pesticides resulting in presence of higher levels of pesticides in all food products which could be the main reason for rise in incurable diseases among people in India. This is mainly because most of the farmers are out of educational system in India and the current education system does not offer basic agriculture studies in high schools.

Developed countries with their monitoring systems are able to stop the farm products with traces of pesticides from India. However in India, due to lack of monitoring systems, farm products with traces of pesticides are available in the markets and People are consuming these farm products with pesticides and becoming targets for deadly diseases.

In order to come out of the above recurring agricultural issues year after year, a long term strategy needs to be worked out to make farming community in India self reliant, scientific and stand on their feet.

• The solution is to create government owned state agricultural Corporations (SAC) which takes land from farmers on lease for 25 years and also make the farmers part of the Scientific agriculture. It is a form of public sector but with a limited period of existence.

• Each mandal should have agricultural corporation(MAC) which does the farming with the help of Agricultural engineers, scientists and existing farming work force (farmers and labor).

• Agricultural engineers shall manage all farming activities from seeding to final product quality control. Agricultural economists in State governments in coordination with Union government generate year wise agricultural plan for each mandal for both rabi and kharif seasons.

• State and mandal agricultural corporations (SAC&MAC) implement yearly agricultural plans. Yearly capital is dealt by state agricultural corporations with financial institutions .SAC will take insurance cover from insurance companies.

• Further, introduce agriculture as a subject from 9th to 12th grade (for students opting for farm work after 12th) in all high schools and junior colleges and allow people with 12th grade certificate in agriculture for farming activities. This is the only way to create scientific agricultural work force.

• Introduce 4 year Agriculture Engineering Course in Engineering colleges.

• Encourage entrepreneurs to set up large scale agriculture farm equipment for planting and seeding, tillage, spraying, fertilizer applicators, harvestors and advanced farming equipment in big way and absorb existing manual agriculture labor force into manufacturing sector

Once the farming community becomes self reliant in all aspects, Governments should think of unleasing the lands to farmers and make the agricultural corporations into mandal agricultural cooperatives.

Agriculture, being the mainstay of India, it is high time that agriculture practices in all modes should be regulated as a Profession (from agriculture labor to scientists& Engineers)through Professional Agricultural Act enacted in the form of legislation.

In this way, Indian farming community can become modern and scientific in all aspects of agriculture in a period of 25 years. Or else governments have to spend all the time over credit issues, crop damages, farmer suicides, shipment rejections and social unrest in an endless cycle.