Accelerating Farm Income Growth in India: A Sustainable Development Perspective

Joydeep Ghosh*

Director, Institute for Economic Modeling Studies, New Delhi, India

*Corresponding Author: Joydeep Ghosh, Director, Institute for Economic Modeling Studies, New Delhi, India.

Received: February 26, 2018; Published: March 26, 2018

Citation: Joydeep Ghosh. “Accelerating Farm Income Growth in India: A Sustainable Development Perspective". Acta Scientific Agriculture 2.4 (2018).

  Between 1993-94 and 2015-16 aggregate farm income in real terms increased annually at 3.1 percent while per cultivator farm income increased annually at 3.4 percent, due to decline in the number of cultivators during this period. The first thought that strikes looking at these figures is that farmers’ income growth was much lower than national income growth, which was about 6.7 percent on average, during this period. This is an important fact that cannot be taken lightly because it has major implications for overall development of the country. The recent initiatives of the government to double farmers’ income by 2022 is thus a welcome step to correct imbalances in income growth in the country. According to estimates by Chand (2017) doubling real income of farmers between 2015-16 and 2022-23 requires annual growth of 10.41 percent, which is more than three times the annual income growth observed during 1993-94 and 2015-16. The main observation of the study is that Herculean efforts are required to double farmers’ income by 2022, that is, much better outcomes in terms of technology and institutions are required than what has been observed in the past to achieve this target. The issue of sustainability cannot be ignored in this context.

Copyright: © 2018 Joydeep Ghosh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.