Recasting India (17 page)

T
HESE WORDS COULD HAVE COME FROM THE CHIEF MINISTER OF THE
large central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. In fact he said something similar to me: “When I became chief minister, people told me the only hope is to diminish agriculture. I used to say but can't we get growth through agriculture? They would laugh in my face,” Shivraj Singh Chouhan told me.

Chief Minister Chouhan was hardly known across India until about two years ago. His fame, if any, was restricted to his sprawling central Indian state, which was known for poverty, farmer suicides, terrible infrastructure (including some of the worst roads in the country) and its
dacoit
-infested ravines.

Madhya Pradesh made up the “M” in BIMARU, the Indian acronym for lost-cause states. The word BIMARU comes from
bimar
, Hindi for “ill.”

Then something wonderful happened. Madhya Pradesh became an agricultural powerhouse producing record tons of grains (mainly wheat) and delivering the unthinkable. Madhya Pradesh produced 19.46 million metric tons (21.45 million short tons) of grain in 2011–2012, a record jump of 19 percent or 16 million metric tons (17.64 short tons) from the 2010–2011 season. The state has achieved something that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. It matches, and sometimes even beats, traditional “food basket” states like Haryana and Punjab and is one of the biggest contributors to the central government's pool for food security.

This has happened in a short time in the history of a state. In 2002–2003, Madhya Pradesh contributed barely 200,000 metric tons (220,462 short tons) to the central pool. By 2012, it produced 85,000,000 metric tons (93,697,000 short tons).

This kind of success must be considered in the context of what is happening in Indian agriculture. India's National Crime Record Bureau calculates that 270,940 farmers have killed themselves since 1995. Between 1995 and 2000, farmers committed suicide at the rate of 14,462 per year, and between 2001 and 2011, this went up to 16,743 per year. Lack of agrarian storage facilities and sheer neglect means that India wastes 40 million tons of wheat each year according to the “Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not” report (2013) of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
²

How did Chouhan do it?

In a sense his model has been the reverse of the model in many other Indian states that are trying to industrialize and are moving people out of agriculture. “I realized that there can be high growth in agriculture too—and it would be impossible in a predominantly agrarian state to remove large numbers of people from farming. That would be a disaster.”

India's leading agriculture activist, Devinder Sharma, says Chouhan realized that forced industrialization would only create “agricultural refugees, who would struggle to find jobs in towns and cities. And they had no skills to help them find and keep those jobs. Also, the towns and cities of Madhya Pradesh—as is true for most of India—don't have the capacity to take in millions of new people who are in essence refugees.”

Chouhan won a record third five-year term as chief minister in 2013 and in his first decade in power pushed the area under irrigation from one million hectares (2,471,053 acres) in 2004 to 2.5 million hectares (6,177,635 acres) by 2013. In 2012 alone, his government gave out Rs 9,000 crore ($1.5 billion) to three million farmers in the state as zero-interest loans. Madhya Pradesh has been steadily decreasing the rate of interest on government-provided agricultural loans from about 15 to 16 percent when Chouhan came to power in 2005 to 7 percent in 2003, 5 percent in 2008 and 3 percent in 2010. By 2012, it hit zero. These loans are largely given to farmers to buy seeds and farming implements.

“Madhya Pradesh showed the way for constructive government intervention at a time when the microfinance institutions were charging anything between 24 and 36 percent,” says Devinder Sharma.

“It was a huge sigh of relief and showed Chouhan as a pioneer.”

The zero-percent loans have also raised the percentage of loan recovery in agriculture, hitting an all-time high of 78 percent in 2012, with 4.5 million farmers who had Kisan Credit Cards or agrarian loan cards. Loans were given to farmers to buy cattle and drip irrigation facilities. And—in a simple but much-needed intervention—when they brought their produce to the bazaar, it was weighed by electronic weighing machines that were much more accurate and tamper proof compared to the old mechanical machines. A digital records system was created that had a bank of 1.5 million farmers with details of their landholdings, bank accounts, mobile numbers and preferred procurement centers for the process of government purchase of grain at a minimum support price. This has helped grain procurement levels jump from 4.9 million metric tons (5.4 million short tons) in 2003 to 12.7 million metric tons (14 short tons) in 2012. The other big factor has been fixing the electricity supply to farms. Chouhan has separated agriculture power feeders from industrial ones, waived off Rs 1,800 crore ($303 million) in pending power bills of agriculture consumers, and ensured at least ten hours of uninterrupted power supply a day. The power supplied to agriculture was 6,776 million units in 2009; it increased to 9,478 million units in 2012–2013, a jump of 40 percent. Warehousing improved too—from 7.9 million metric tons (8.7 million short tons) in 2010–2011 to 11.5 million metric tons (12.68 short tons) in 2013–2014, with an aim of reaching 15 million metric tons (16.5 million short tons) in 2014–2015 (which if achieved would be higher than in any other state). Madhya Pradesh is the first state in the country to use silo bags to store grain.

In 2008, Chouhan, 52, who is the son of a poor farmer and who won a gold medal in philosophy for his master's degree, made one of his greatest moves in agriculture by giving a Rs 100 bonus per quintal of wheat procured above and apart from the central government–determined minimum support price. This was raised in 2013 to Rs 150.

Chouhan's agriculture production commissioner Madan Mohan Upadhyay explains it best.

“He is a hardcore farmer,” says Upadhyay. “He came in with a pure focus—most people work in agriculture in this state, so growth has to be agriculture driven first and then expand to industry.”

Even in farmer suicides, although Madhya Pradesh is among the top five states according to the National Crime Record Bureau, statistics show that the number of such cases has been steadily falling in the state. The bureau records that farmer suicides fell by 8 percent between 2009 and 2010 due to the sharp fall in two states—Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

In 2012–2013, Madhya Pradesh beat Bihar to become the fastest-growing major Indian state according to data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO). The state grew 14.28 percent in agriculture (at a time when overall agricultural growth in India has been growing at the level of barely 3 percent a year for the last three decades), and its state gross domestic product (GSDP) grew by 10.02 percent. In 2011–2012, Bihar topped the charts with 13.26 percent GSDP growth, and Madhya Pradesh came second at 11.81 percent, but in 2012–2013, Bihar's GSDP growth fell to 9.48 percent. Per capita income in Madhya Pradesh rose by 8.69 percent in 2012–2013.

In fact, surrounded by deeply indebted states like Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, Madhya Pradesh's net debt as a percentage of GSDP has fallen to 21.7 percent from 33 percent in the last six years, while percentage of interest payment as a percentage of revenue receipts has reduced from 15 percent to 9 percent in the last six years.

This performance is no fluke. In 2010–2011, agriculture in Madhya Pradesh grew by 9 percent. In 2009–2010, when the state got 35 percent less rainfall than usual, agrarian growth was still 7.2 percent. In the same period, industrial growth was one of the highest in India at 10.1 percent, though from a smaller base since 80 percent of the people still work in agriculture.

The chief minister says he had a long-term strategy when he started by focusing on agriculture. “If you look at history, the development has always happened first and most expansively at coastal areas, with ports like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bengal, but we are a landlocked state. So what do we do?

“So focus on agriculture first. Our aim is to become the wheat bowl of the country, why should it only be Punjab? As I keep telling people, take wheat from us, we are centrally located and therefore it is easier to transport to any area in India. We are a natural road transport hub. And if we produce a lot of food, it is a win-win for the whole country because food can be transported to any part quickly from the center.”

Madan Mohan Upadhyay, who was also the former health secretary of the state, says he understood the chief minister's mindset when, in one of the first meetings, Chouhan, the father of two sons, described how in his childhood village he saw women struggling and even dying in childbirth. From that gruesome experience was born his innovative policy decision to start a Janani Express—a helpline in every district of Madhya Pradesh, where any woman about to give birth could call for a government ambulance to fetch her to the nearest hospital.

Chief Secretary R. Parasuram says the chief minister draws his policies deeply from his personal experiences. “This is why you will never see him in denial about female infanticide in MP (and why one of the biggest schemes of the government is on female infanticide).”

Madhya Pradesh is one of the worst offenders in declining sex ratio. This happens in India because some girl children are killed by parents in the womb or shortly after birth. One of the parents' main fears is the dowry that would have to be paid to a groom's family during the marriage of a daughter. That's why Chouhan has also started a scheme where he plays father of the bride in mass weddings organized by the state for poor girls, who are given Rs 15,000 when they get married. The chief minister himself gives them away, often at a scale of thousands in one go. This is one of the reasons why he has earned the nickname “Mamu” or maternal uncle in the state since giving away the bride is often a role played by maternal uncles in the absence of the father.

The chief minister says that for him policy starts at home. “Most people don't know that I have nine adopted daughters.”

Some of the biggest beneficiaries of these schemes are farmers since villages have the highest rates of female infanticide and lack of hospital facilities—and so once again agriculture gets empowered in the state.

His efforts have won Madhya Pradesh the national agriculture prize, the Krishi Karman Samman, twice in a row. In 2012–2013, Madhya Pradesh produced 27.7 million metric tons (30.5 million short tons) of grain, including 16.1 million metric tons (17.75 million short tons) of wheat. Madhya Pradesh now contributes 11.2 percent of India's total food grain production, 17.5 percent of India's total wheat production and 28.65 percent of its total pulses production. Madhya Pradesh surpassed other prominent agricultural states in India including Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Bihar in the category of states producing over 10 million metric tons (11.02 million short tons) of food grain in every aspect from production of grains to increase in yield.

“We wanted to prove that agriculture—which everyone seems to have given up on in India—can be reinvented. There can be a business model in agriculture too,” Chouhan told me. “To do this, I began to rethink farming as a sustainable and growing, very profitable business which has maximum community impact and every farmer as a single business unit, as a successful social entrepreneur.”

 

Kalpana Saroj was 15 years old, or perhaps 16—she does not accurately remember—when she drank three bottles of pesticide. It would, she hoped, do exactly what she wanted: kill her.

For 24 hours Saroj, who now owns a Rs 250 crore ($42 million) empire that stretches from sugar to real estate to industrial pipes to movies, seemed to have slipped into a coma even as doctors at the local hospital near her native Roperkheda village in Vidarbha, the drought-ridden heart of the western state of Maharashtra, struggled to wash the poison out of her stomach. Then, just as suddenly and beating tremendous odds, she began to awaken.