Moreover, growing more food isn’t the solution to providing employment. Jobs aside, India needs to shift from basic farming to more efficient, sustainable, and productive farming. Unfortunately, today’s agriculture policies fail to recognise how crop choices, input costs, and the supply chain are intertwined, perpetuating marginal farming. Oday’s agriculture policies fail to recognise how crop choices, input costs, and the supply chain are intertwined, perpetuating marginal farming. The US also focuses on many crops suitable for mechanisation, but even using metrics from many East Asian countries, with about 10% of the population in agriculture - as opposed to half the workforce for India - that is hundreds of millions of people who could shift to alternative options.
The US is extreme with less than 2% of its population growing food sufficient for almost 2 billion people, but much of it is fed to animals. But how many people would India need farming if it were as labour efficient as the US for growing crops? I am not suggesting it is possible, or even desirable (large, mechanised farms with massive chemical and water inputs) but as a thought exercise? Just four million people.
Officially farmers are only a few hundred million, but adding family members who help or occasionally farm, as also wage labourers, the number of farm workers is likely to be closer to half a billion people. India is an agricultural country. Agriculture is “only” ~16 % of GDP but the largest sector for employment.