On the surface, it looks impressive. Last year, India produced 353.96 million tonnes of foodgrains — a record, comfortably above the official target of 341.55 million tonnes. The minister called it a triumph of “One Nation – One Agriculture – One Team.”
But scratch beneath the glossy slogans and conference hall applause, and a darker picture emerges. Indian farming is trapped in a cycle of lopsided procurement, bloated subsidies, volatile global markets, and climate shocks. The government’s fixation on headline targets masks the reality that the farm economy is buckling under contradictions — between political optics and farmer realities, between surpluses that rot in warehouses and deficits that drive imports, between the rhetoric of resilience and the lived experience of risk.
Yes, India grows a lot of rice and wheat. The Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns are overflowing, procurement spending on these two crops alone has ballooned past ₹2.1 trillion in 2023–24, and public distribution continues to shovel out subsidised grain to millions.
But while Delhi congratulates itself, the country imports nearly 60% of its edible oil requirements and remains the world’s largest buyer of pulses. The same government that boasts of record grain also scrambles every few months to secure overseas shipments of tur dal or palm oil. It is the worst of both worlds: gluts in some crops that pile up in storage and deficits in others that drain foreign exchange.
This is not food security. It is selective abundance — a policy-engineered imbalance that politicians refuse to confront because rice and wheat make for electoral comfort, while oilseeds and pulses don’t guarantee votes.
The imbalance is no accident. It is baked into India’s minimum support price (MSP) regime. Though MSPs are officially announced for 23 crops, more than 70% of procurement spending goes to rice and wheat. Pulses and oilseeds are stepchildren of the system — procured erratically, stored poorly, and often dumped back onto private markets when prices turn inconvenient.
Farmers are not fools. They know that if they grow rice or wheat, government procurement is virtually assured. If they grow pulses or oilseeds, they gamble with volatile prices and patchy state support. So they choose rationally, even if it means growing water-hungry rice in semi-arid Punjab or wheat in over-exploited Haryana. The government’s rhetoric about diversifying into “nutritional crops” collapses at the procurement gate.
Every year, policymakers urge farmers to shift acreage toward pulses and oilseeds. Every year, farmers ignore them — because the incentives remain stacked against change. The real failure is not farmer “resistance,” but government unwillingness to put its procurement money where its policy mouth is.
If procurement distorts cropping choices, subsidies distort everything else. India spent nearly ₹1.9 trillion on fertiliser subsidies in 2022–23, the highest ever, and another ₹1.5 trillion in 2024–25. Add over ₹1.3 trillion on food subsidies, and agriculture guzzles more fiscal resources than health and education combined.
But what does this gargantuan outlay deliver? Over-use of urea, soil degradation, groundwater depletion, and a system that keeps farmers dependent on handouts instead of investing in structural resilience. Subsidies lock India into the very crops — rice and wheat — that the country already produces in excess, while leaving climate-resilient crops and sustainable farming practices underfunded.
Subsidies are politically unassailable, of course. Cutting them risks farmer protests, as the 2020 farm law debacle showed. But pouring trillions into the same old system ensures that agriculture never escapes its treadmill of dependence. It is easier for ministers to boast about targets than to admit the subsidy regime is bankrupting both the exchequer and the soil.
The monsoon was once India’s lottery. Now it is its roulette table — unpredictable, destructive, and increasingly unforgiving. This year, all-India rainfall was 7% above normal as of mid-September. But the averages hide chaos: Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan drowned in 40–68% excess rain, while Bihar and Assam withered under 30–40% deficits. Ladakh clocked a staggering 400% surplus.
The consequences are already visible. Floods washed away standing crops in Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra, and Assam. Meanwhile, drought-like conditions plague the eastern belt. India may boast a record harvest on aggregate, but individual farmers are counting losses.
The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana was designed to protect against such shocks. In practice, it has failed repeatedly. Claim settlement is delayed, farmers complain of under-assessment, and insurers have often walked away richer while cultivators wait months for compensation. Every year, ministers promise “timely disbursal.” Every year, farmers in flood-hit districts discover the promises don’t reach their fields.
The government insists seed supply is comfortable, with 25 million metric tonnes available against a 22.9 million tonne requirement. But fertilisers tell another story. With higher sowing, demand is already climbing. Imports of phosphatic and potassic fertilisers are vulnerable to global volatility. And when official channels choke, black markets flourish, forcing farmers to pay inflated rates.
Worse, counterfeit inputs continue to circulate. Raids in Rajasthan uncovered spurious pesticides and fertilisers, but such crackdowns are episodic. Smallholders often discover fake seeds only when their crops fail — by then, it is too late. The damage is borne entirely by farmers; accountability vanishes in the bureaucratic fog. For a government that loves “Lab to Land” slogans, ensuring farmers don’t get fake inputs should be the most basic responsibility. Yet year after year, the problem persists.
India’s farm economy does not exist in isolation. Global rice and wheat markets are tightening as exporters like Thailand and Russia tweak quotas. Palm oil shipments from Southeast Asia remain erratic. Pulses supplies from Africa and Myanmar are climate-sensitive.
This means that India’s food inflation — and by extension, household budgets — remains hostage to foreign weather and geopolitical shifts. Domestic abundance of rice and wheat cannot shield consumers from price spikes in edible oil or dal. Economists expect FY26 inflation to average 3.1%, down from earlier projections, helped by GST cuts and strong reservoirs. But one shock in global pulses or palm oil, and that comfort will vanish.
This cycle of grand declarations and ground-level disappointments is not new. In 2008, the National Food Security Mission pledged to boost pulses and oilseeds. Yields barely moved. In 2016, a “pulses mission” was launched after soaring prices; procurement collapsed once global prices eased. In 2020, the farm laws aimed to overhaul markets but were rolled back after massive protests, leaving structural inefficiencies untouched.
Every crisis has triggered a “mission” or “abhiyan.” None has restructured incentives or empowered farmers to break free of the rice-wheat trap. Instead, India has institutionalised short-term fixes, while long-term reforms are abandoned at the first sign of political resistance.
The government had once promised to double farmers’ incomes by 2022. That deadline has passed, quietly buried. The latest surveys show the average monthly income of an agricultural household remains below ₹12,000. For nearly half the country’s workforce, that is the harsh reality.
So when Delhi celebrates record production, farmers shrug. More grain rarely means more money in their pockets. Instead, they face rising input costs, stagnant market prices, and mounting risks from floods, droughts, and pests. The disconnect between policy optics and farmer economics could not be starker.
Fixing this requires political courage. It means rationalising procurement to include pulses and oilseeds, not just rice and wheat. It means shifting subsidies from urea to irrigation efficiency and soil health. It means enforcing strict quality control on seeds and pesticides. It means guaranteeing insurance payouts within weeks, not months.
It also means admitting that agriculture cannot be sustained on conference targets and fiscal handouts alone. Farmers need functioning markets, real price discovery, and state support that extends beyond election cycles.
But these are hard choices. They upset entrenched interests, challenge electoral arithmetic, and demand long-term thinking in a system addicted to short-term gains. Which is why they are unlikely to happen.
And so, India will keep announcing bigger and bigger production targets. Next year, perhaps 370 million tonnes. The year after, 380. The numbers will look good in speeches, and ministers will declare victory. But farmers will remain trapped — growing the same crops, on the same thin margins, under the same risks, while policymakers shuffle targets like playing cards.
India does not suffer from a shortage of grain. It suffers from a shortage of political will. Until that deficit is addressed, every record harvest will be less a milestone than a mirage — proof not of progress, but of how stubbornly the country clings to failed farm economics dressed up as success. (IPA Service)
Record Harvests, Empty Wallets: The Mirage of India’s Farm Targets
Poor Farmers Still Face Financial Crunch as Production Continues to Rise
R. Suryamurthy - 2025-09-17 12:44
India’s agriculture establishment loves big numbers. Year after year, ministers stand before cameras to announce record production targets, claiming the country’s farmers are marching toward self-sufficiency and prosperity. The latest came at the National Agriculture Conference – Rabi Abhiyan 2025, where Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan set an eye-popping target of 362.5 million tonnes of foodgrain for 2025–26.