Most of the Indian marginal farmers have been impacted by climate change in recent years, but few have the means to adapt, according to a new report.

The findings come at a time when crops across plains of North India and Himalayan hills suffered damage in the recent years from the early onset of summer and unseasonal rainfall — a result of climate change. Wheat, the staple of North India, has been hit particularly hit hard as the production fell this harvesting season for the third year straight. Rice, another staple in many parts of the country, has also been affected.

As many as 60 per cent of India’s marginal farmers have suffered significant crop losses due to extreme weather events in the five years, according to the report from the Forum of Enterprises for Equitable Development (FEED) and Development Intelligence Unit (DIU).

The report, titled State of Marginal Farmers of India – 2024, found that 50 per cent of farmers lost half of their paddy yield and 42 per cent lost half of their wheat crops.

Even as most of the India’s marginal farmers —those with less than 1 hectare of land— lose crops and suffer economically, most of them lack the proper means to adapt. The report found that 51 per cent do not have access to any formal loans and only 27 per cent had access to bank loans. This suggests they either lack access to any capital to diversify cultivation or rely on informal landing that’s more often than not predatory and is geared towards trapping farmers in a cycle of debt.

What can be done to help India’s marginal farmers?

It is not just access to credit that farmers lack. They also lack access to expertise.

The report found that as many as 28 per cent of marginal farmers did not have access to any advisory and those who did relied overwhelmingly on either input dealers or fellow farmers — both of them unlikely to be real experts in agriculture.

For around 14.6 crore farmers in India, there are only 2,00,000 extension workers, according to government data. They are neither enough nor equipped properly to address all the concerns of India’s marginal farmers, said Samuel Praveen Kumar, the Joint Secretary (Extension) at the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare (MoAF).

Kumar suggested that the digital mediums and artificial intelligence (AI) applications could help bridge the gap.

Kumar said, “What if as the farmer talks to an operative at the Kisan Call Centre, the AI application picks up on the conversation and finds a video related to the farmers’ query and sends it to the farmers phone? When the farmer would be done with the call, they would have the video on their phone that would help them understand the situation much better. The technology with agrarian start-ups can also be utilised.”

Kumar further said that the government is working to train women members of self-help groups (SHGs) in rural areas as para-extension workers.

Harish Damodaran, another member of the panel discussing the report’s findings, noted that animal husbandry could be helpful to farmers to increase their incomes. He said that while farmers could be bound by constraints of capital, they don’t have lack of labour and labour-intensive dairy farming —which does not require much capital— should be promoted to help them.

“The land and capital are scarce but the labour is not. Animal husbandry should be the way forward for marginal farmers’ income diversification. The way we research on new crop breeds, we should also research on fodder types that boost milk production. If such breeds of fodder come up, small farmers may just grow fodder on their small plots of land to feed their cows and sell their milk. Poultry is another option that should be encouraged,” said Domodaran, the National Rural Affairs and Agriculture Editor at The Indian Express newspaper.

Damodaran further said that the biggest challenge is to retain people in farming. He highlighted that most people would leave farming at the first opportunity and said that initiatives should focus on giving farmers a pathway to make farming profitable instead of making them shift to another profession in cities.

Can private sector really be the way forward?

The report as well as the panelists said that digital interventions by the state and partnerships with the private sector could help solve the many issues in Indian agriculture. But is that a workable premise?

There remains a deep mistrust of the private sector in the farming community as has also been seen in multiple round of agitations in recent years. In such a case, how can private sector be part of the solution? In response to such questions, Sandeep Ghosh of DIU, said it depends on how the private sector is deployed and what problems you seek it to address.

Ghosh told Firstpost that the private sector has certainly failed to make a difference in the domain of financial inclusion or crop insurance, so you cannot expect to deploy it there and see a positive change, but there are areas where it can indeed make a difference.

“The innovations in the private sector in my view are happening more on the digital side. I don’t see too much of innovations happening in the financial inclusion side. Most of the private sector innovations in agricultural sector are on supply chain management and on digitisation where this lack of trust really is not happening. The work of Digital Green in terms of farmer-generated videos is an excellent example. Most of the other examples that I have given in the report is primarily to do with that, that essentially how to streamline the supply chain management and also to get advisories out there to the people,” said Sandeep Ghosh, the Director of DIU, who worked on the report.

Not all, or most, of the marginal farmers may smartphones to access such content. Ghosh flagged another concern of ‘SIM churn’.

“In rural, for any programme, SIM churn is a great issue. It refers to the situation where people frequently change phone numbers. They may have registered with a government agency or a government programme from one number but then they may have changed it. In such cases, neither they can access the benefits nor the government can trace them easily to distribute advisories or other things,” said Ghosh.

The private players, or even the government for that matter, cannot completely rely on a broadcast channel to reach out to the farmers.

Ghosh said that you would need a local point of contact who works as the bridge between the central place from where the information has to be disseminated and the people.

“The private players have realised they have to have a point person who is extending the services or advisories to the people. This point person has a phone or a tablet with them on which it shows content to farmers. If you rely completely on a broadcasting method where you think messages will automatically reach people and they will understand, I don’t think India is at that stage where this can be done,” said Ghosh.

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Most Indian marginal farmers impacted by climate change, few have means to adapt, finds new report