Nearly a quarter of a century after In-dia launched its first big liberalising reforms in 1991, setting off a new spurt of growth, one area of the country's economy remains hardly touched: farming. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, launched a 24-hour state-run TV channel for farmers in May, but has fostered no public debate about how to improve India's dreadfully backward agriculture. This matters. About 600m Indians, or roughly half the population, depend upon growing crops or rearing animals to survive. Many farming practices, along with India's agricultural markets, infrastructure, insurance and rules on leasing land, have barely changed in decades. Reform is long overdue. On the surface, things do not look too bad in the countryside. Rural poverty has fallen sharply in the past 15 years. Yet this is because services such as selling mobile phones or motorbikes have boomed across India. It has also helped that previous governments greatly increased welfare spending in the countryside. But the productivity of farming itself has been woeful. Contributing just 13.7% to Indian GDP, agriculture has grown by around 3% a year in recent years, far slower than the rest of the economy.
展开▼
