If I were the Prime Minister of India

The opening up of the farm sector is partly responsible for the crisis amongst cotton growers but the crisis in the entire agriculture sector has emerged because of criminal under investment and utter neglect by policymakers. Farming is not remunerative and there is a crisis because of 1. low productivity, 2. poor water availability, 3. lack of credit, 4. low farmgate realizations, 5. lack of market intelligence and 6. lack of risk management tools. If I were the prime minister of India, I would do the following immediately to sort out the agrarian crisis in India:
Tackling exploitation: The central government should promulgate a “Prevention of Atrocities on Farmers and Farm Labourers Act” for addressing usurious moneylending and land grabbing. Under this act all land that has been grabbed by moneylenders in the last 10 years should revert back to the owners. Courts must be instructed to fast track cases instituted under this act.
Securitising moneylender assets: The central govt must instruct lead banks in all the districts through RBI to securities loans of legal moneylenders to farmers and take the asset pledged with moneylenders as their own security and reschedule the loan from the farmer as a loan to the bank. For people who are landless or who do not have assets, such loans must be taken over by banks or MFIs or co-operative banks on their books against the cash flows due to these people under the NREGP.
Medium Term Solutions for Credit: The central instruct all PSU and large private banks them to create 6000 odd Micro Finance Institutions under their tutelage at every tehsil in the country within six months. MFIs would lend to members and riskier classes which are outside the purview of the banking system today and who are serviced as well as exploited by money lenders.
Augmenting water availability and efficiency: The 400 odd pending projects round the country need around 1,50,000 crores to be invested to add 21 mha of irrigated land and the center should pick up 100 pct of this cost since the states are broke. Improve efficiency (from 30% to over 40%) of water use in irrigation requires quantum jumps in use of drip and sprinkler irrigation in India and for adoption the costs of these items have to be made far more cheaper than the levels existing today. Rainwater harvesting should be mandatory for all constructions in India.
Addressing Yields: Yields in India are stagnant for a decade now and the central government should give out Rs 200-300 crores(per crop) in grants in competitive bidding processes to public and private agencies who agree on milestones to bring out suitable seeds which would increase the yields to levels comparable in the western world.
Risk Management: The futures markets should be used by farmer groups like producer cos, co-ops and other associations to manage price risks on behalf of their individual members. The bill on warehouse receipt system which is with Parliament since a long time should be promulgated for deeper penetration.
Extension Education: The Central Government should build a 24 hour national channel for agriculture with feeds going to all narrowcasting LPTs of prasar Bharti. The Govt must contract out or build a countrywide network for primary research on scientific crop planting intention and subsequent crop surveys to provide accurate supply demand estimates all over the country.
Alternate Energy crops: The bottlenecks for rapid growth and expansion of acreage under biofuels crops are largely excise duties on biofuel, sales taxes, non availability of land for growing etc. These crops can bring millions of small holders or landless out of poverty and urgent steps need to be taken to kickstart this work.

Sunil