| dc.description.abstract | The Indian agriculture is at a peculiar state today, as it has been for past few decades now. It employs a great chunk of the population, 41.49% as per Statista report 2020 (Exhibit 1). While the number of people employed by the sector is at all time low and has been steadily decreasing from 51.52% in 2010 to 41.49% in 2020, the workforce still represents almost half of India’s employment. As the number of people employed in agriculture has decreased by almost 10 percentage points in past decade, it can be assumed that a similar decrease will be seen in the contribution of Agriculture in India’s GDP. Exhibit 2 shows the share of industry, services, and agriculture in India’s GDP in past decade till 2019. As the graph shows, the contribution made by agriculture in GDP has decreased from 16.74% in 2009 to 15.96% in 2019.
Comparing both the stats provide an interesting insight. While the people involved in agriculture have shrunk by 10 percentage points or 19.4% overall the impact on its contribution to GDP has been very low at 4% overall. Does this mean that there was a lot of hidden unemployment in agricultural sector? Or does it mean that the productivity has increased multifold? These questions are even more evident when we include latest findings from the Economic survey 2020, the contribution of Agriculture in India’s GDP has touched 20% (Subramanian, 2020-21). While some of this increase can be attributed to overall shrinking of GDP and the economic factors due to covid induced pandemic and national lockdown that followed, the statistics pose some interesting questions. Can we attribute the increase and decrease of employment to a cyclical event? Will Agriculture remain a robust option of alternative employment for majority of Indians which they can fall back on during times of crisis? Is the sector seeing a revival or the increase is temporary? Which bring us to a wider question: Does the sector need liberalization and application of technology suggested as per the hotly contested farm bills? | en_US |
