Introduction

National Consultation with farmers was organized as a part of Leave No One Behind Consultations towards the preparation of India’s VNR 2020, to be presented in the High Level Political Forum in July 2020. The Consultation co-organized by CECOEDECON, MAUSAM, PAIRVI & ASHA in collaboration with Wada Na TodoAbhiyan witnessed participation of more than 200 farmers and all major national farmers’ organizations. It looked at farmers as social groups and delved deep into challenges and vulnerabilities of rainfed farmers, women farmers, tenant farmers, landless farmers, livestock farmers and pastoralists and adivasi farmers and came up with actionable recommendations and suggestions.The participants appreciated the efforts of the NitiAayog and UNRC to have a consultation with farmers in preparing the VNR of India. The Consultation emphasized that the SDGs cannot be achieved in the world unless they are achieved in India and for India to achieve the SDGs, small and marginal farmers, women farmers and agricultural workers are critical. One out of 4 persons in India is either a farmer or an agricultural worker. Small and marginal farmers constitute 80% of the total farm households, 50% of rural households and 36% of total
households in India.

Major challenges and vulnerabilities

From independence when agriculture contributed to 50% of the national GDP, farmers have had immense contribution to the Indian economy. Since the green revolution though the contribution to the GDP has gradually declined, farmers have made impressive gains for the country. Today, India is the largest producer of pulses in the world. India is the largest producer of milk and jute and has second largest population of cattle. It is also the second largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, and cotton and groundnut as well as second largest producer of fruits and vegetables.

However, India still has many growing concerns, agricultures contribution to the GDP has steadily declined. While achieving self-sufficiency in food production, India still accounts for a quarter of world’s hungry people and is home to 190 M undernourished people. Incidence of poverty is now pegged at below 30%. As per Global Nutrition Report (2016) India ranks 114 out of 132 countries on under 5 stunting, and 120th out of 130 countries on under 5 wasting and 170 out of 185 countries on prevalence of anemia. Anemia continues to effect 50% women and 60% of the children in the country. The resource intensive ways of Indian agriculture has raised serious sustainability issues too. Increasing stress on water resources, desertification and land degradation also pose major threats to agriculture in the country.

Rising indebtedness, continuing farmers suicides, land alienation and landlessness, disappearing commons, defeminization of agriculture, lack of attention to the situation of rainfed, tenant and landless and women farmers, deteriorating soil health and farmers health due to use of harmful chemical fertilizers and pesticides, were identified as major challenges.

Climate change, deteriorating water availability, decreasing access to forest, focus on increasing productivity, and policy antipathy towards farmers and agriculture are the main drivers for the poor conditions of the farmers. The failure to address these systemic concerns has resulted in poor performance of many programmes aimed towards improving the resilience and income of the farmers.

RAINFED FARMERS

Rainfed farmers compose majority of farming community in India cultivating millets, pulses, oilseeds, cotton etc.NitiAayog’s report and CWC report emphasizes that 50% of the arable land in India will remain rainfed despite all efforts. Therefore, more focus is needed in protecting and strengthening rain fed agriculture systems. Present support to agriculture and farmers remains skewed in the favour of irrigated agriculture and have largely side stepped the needs of the rainfed farmers.

The rainfed famers challenges and vulnerabilities are compounded by a number of factors including mixed topography, varied agro-climatic zones, marginal and poor soils unsuitable for green revolution crops, significant risk of crop loss due to extended dry spells and floods, limited access to institutions, underdeveloped market access, little funds for input investments and small farms etc. They mostly have only crop per year. While farmers in the irrigated areas earn 60% of their income from agriculture, their counterpart in the rain fed areas only earn around 20-30% from agriculture. While the average yield is around 1.1 t/ha in rain fed areas, in irrigated areas it stands at 2.8 t/ha. There is a significant overlap between aspirational districts and predominantly rainfed districts where agriculture accounts for only 20%. Rainfed districts are characterized by mostly predominant tribal populations, high poverty, hunger and malnutrition.

Recommendations

• An exclusive policy dedicated to Rainfedfarming is needed at the earliest. Rainfed agriculture is vastly different and immensely diverse within, from irrigated agriculture with respect to – risk involved, climate change exposure, water availability, soil quality, crop input, soil quality, crop pattern, topography, eligibility to avail subsidies under current policies and access to institutional and market support.
• Extensive and contextual investment in watershed management as opposed large scale water projects
• Investment in traditional/indigenous livestock for sustainable livelihoods.
• Promote natural farming with reduced use of chemical fertilisers.
• Introduce innovative technologies to manage ground water and common water resources.
• Impart education and capacity building for community water management.
• Invest in research on climate resilient rainfed agriculture
• Enable diverse income sources both from agri and non-agri based sectors for rainfed farmers to make rural life for them economically viable.
• Seed Security against Climate Variability Programme by creating community based Traditional Seed Banks. The present Seed Village programme can be modified to integrate it with seed subsidies of various schemes. The programme can be managed by farmers’ organisations in close partnership with the Department of Agriculture.
• A separate MSP for rainfed produce commensurate with the risk and ecosystem services provided by them. Extensive inclusion of rainfed produce in PDS, MDM and ICDS which will also help with better meeting nutritional needs of the population.
• Setup and invest in Regional Research Centres dedicated to Rainfed Agriculture
• Create infrastructure for rainfed produce that will reduce losses and waste across the value chain.
• Develop and strengthen local Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) on aspects of resource and infrastructure management, value addition, market linkages, accessing inputs and credit. Create and promote infrastructure for local processing and marketing of agricultural products.
• A dashboard for rainfed districts with appropriate indicators along the lines of the aspirational district dashboard will be valuable.

TENANT FARMERS

Poor tenant farmers constitute one of the most vulnerable and ‘left-behind’ groups today. Lack of formal recognition for tenancy means that it is often assumed that landowners are also cultivators. However, significant changes in the past few decades have increased the extent of tenancy while tenant farmers have remained outside the ambit of government services. Tenant farmers remain hidden and invisible in India – restrictive tenancy laws in the country mean that land-lease arrangements for agriculture are largely informal, leaving tenant farmers out of the government’s without access to various support services (Haque, 2001). At 10.41 percent, area cultivated under tenancy makes up a significant portion of total cultivated area today (NSSO 70th round, 2013), but other crucial data required for identification of tenant farmers and assessment of their status with respect to the SDGs remains unavailable.

Recommendations

• Identification of tenants across the country needs to be the first priority of the state. Given the diversity of problems and concerns faced by fully landless and small-scale land-owning tenants, these categories need to be identified separately and disaggregated data must be publicly available.
• A digital database of tenant farmers must be maintained in every state. As historic and social reasons prevent landowners from acknowledging tenants, such a database must be delinked from identifying data like land survey numbers, allowing tenant cultivators to be recognized without the use of lease agreements. Gram Sabhas and other village organizations can ensure accurate identification of tenants in their village through a social audit process conducted every season.
• The Model Tenancy Act which recommends the liberalization of tenancy laws but must go further to put responsibility on the state to both recognize and ensure access to services for tenant farmers.
• Legalization of tenancy has done little to incentivize landowners to formally recognize tenants, leading their continued exclusion from state services. Support services intended for cultivating farmers, like direct benefit transfers, must be delinked from land ownership to ensure access for actual cultivators, which includes small tenants.
• A credit guarantee fund needs to be set up to ensure that formal credit institutions are willing to further loans to tenant farmers. Other states must follow the example of Andhra Pradesh, which sets targets to reach tenant farmers through priority lending.
• Further steps can be taken to ensure sustainable livelihoods for tenant farmers. Allied livelihood opportunities also need to be made available for landless and small-scale farmers to distribute risk and diversify income sources.
• Women farmers are largely landless and are generally ineligible for government programs. Tenancy agreements must recognize women partners in the household to ensure eligibility for and access to government services.
• , low cost of cultivation as a result of low-input agriculture may also reduce short-term financial risk for cultivators and improve long term resilience of agricultural ecosystems. Thus, special care must be taken to include tenants in sustainable agricultural programs and tailor support systems accordingly.
• All recommendations must be adopted in a three-year time frame for India to ensure that tenant farmers are also able to reach SDGs by the target year of 2030.

WOMEN FARMERS

In rural India, around 80% of women depend on agriculture for their livelihoods; they comprise 33% of cultivators and 47% of agricultural labour. Women cultivators are at a loss without land titles. They participate in agriculture as unpaid subsistence labour and are not recognized as farmers. Hence they are unable to have access to credits and other benefits. Large numbers of rural poor women continue to exist close to the poverty line, and the clustering around the poverty line has only increased, here the smallest variance in climate impacts or any disaster can have calamitous impacts especially in the poverty impacts on rural poor women.

Recent studies point to the increasing incidence of women’s migration as they undertake distress migration in short cycles of 3-4 days (NIPFP 2009) in order to combine their reproductive roles of care giving to household children, elders and animals as well as fetching and foraging of fodder and fuel wood along with seeking wage work elsewhere. This creates its own stresses and impacts on women’s work burden, but is neither adequately recognized nor documented.Recent reports also show defeminization of agriculture meaning that number of women working in agriculture is decreasing presents a major concern, as for the most rural women, employment in agriculture is the last resort.

As against the target of 50% for women’s land ownership, the operational land holding for women is 13.9% as per the SDG- India Index and Dashboard 2019-20, published in December2019.The forest rights claims have also been recognized women’s rights at a much lower rate but data for the same is lacking. Effectively however since the land is recorded primary ownership with men in most cases, women’s independent ownership remains tenuous.Women farmers are not recognized as one category which has been left behind so far. There are no indicators related to women farmers except their land ownership in SDG Index by NitiAyog

Recommendations

• Provide incentives within the procedural acts such as the Stamp Registration Act to provide for minimal registration costs in cases where husbands are either gifting a part of their share to their wives or asking for land partitions in their wives’ names (like in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh).
• Provide disincentives for registering release deeds made by women in favour of men. These will have to be strictly monitored and all such release deeds will have to have a punitive measure attached. It should also be explored if such a specific clause can be added to the succession law itself in order to protect the entitlement of the woman.
• Ensure issue of joint-titles compulsorily in all land grant programs, including the rights recognized under Forest Rights Act, 2006. Make insertion of name of daughter/widowed wife during mutation and/or resurvey and settlement mandatory
• Set up Fast track courts to settle claims on private property by widows, especially so in farm suicide affected states in the country.
• Delink land ownership from “Farmer” definition and creating an alternative farmer registration system for increasing access of women farmers to government schemes and services.
• Allocate separate budget to set up Women’s Land and productive resource centres (Women farmers’ Guidance centres/Women’s Resource Centres) at the block level to provide support to ensure implementation of the succession laws and access to entitlements around productive resources for women farmers. These WRCs should be
  technologically equipped to maintain data base of all the property related cases that are received by them to be able to monitor the progress with regards to claims settled, apart from supporting women farmers to access government schemes.
• All registered FPOs have to have at least 50% membership of women farmers. Here, the definition of a Farmer should not be linked to land title ownership, but of a selfdeclaration as a Farmer. Such an affirmative policy of at least 50% space for women farmers should also be made mandatory for the governance structure of the FPO.
• WCD and DOLR should monitor the progress of implementation of succession laws and put out the data in public domain down to the Gram Panchayat and ward level.
• Monitoring indicators specific to women farmers in the farming, forest and pastoralist and fisheries sectoral groups – to capture changes in ownership, access, income, capacities and representation and leadership

LANDLESS FARMERS

The Census of India, 2011 shows that the number of farmers has dipped by 8.6 million in the past decade, while the number of agriculture workers increased by 37 million. Of the total people employed in agriculture (263 million), more than half of them are agricultural labour, a trend observed for the first time in 4 decades. The SECC (2011) put the households with no land at 56.41% of the total rural households. With the mean household size of 4.9 in rural India, the number of landless comes to 494.9 million. The Committee on State Agrarian Relations and Unfinished Task of Land Reforms pointed out that landlessness had witnessed a phenomenal rise from about 40 percent in 1991 to about 52 percent in 2004-5. The land alienation among the SCs and STs, whose land rights have been protected in various tenancy acts, is on increase and recent data is not available on the same.

Lack of access and ownership of land is the central reason for the vulnerability of landless farmers, which keep them away from accessing and availing benefits meant for the farmers including input and extension support. Landless has also been increasing due to increasing land acquisition for development projects. There has been a consistent loss of farm employment due to increasing mechanization. Lack of off farm employment opportunities and declining real wage present significant challenge to earning a livelihood and sustaining themselves.

MGNREGA is the only source of employment for the landless farmers and there is no significant improvement in the MGNREGA since the last five years as regards the number of days of work (national average less than 50 days) or increase in the wages. The implementation of the land reform laws and the acts like PESA and FRA, which could have enhanced their access to land and minor forest produce is far from effective.

Recommendations

• Land distribution and land allotment should be taken up on priority
• De-link access to and the benefits under the government schemes from ownership of land
• Minimum wages act, equal remuneration act and other labour acts should be implemented properly and effectively
• Effective implementation of FRA and PESA
• The NITI should create a land reform cell which should be working closely with the Department of Land Resources, Land Revenue Departments of the state governments, Tribal Affairs Ministry and other relevant departments.
• Provide employment for at least 200 days instead of 100 days under MGNREGA

LIVESTOCK FARMERS AND PASTORALISTS

Livestock plays an important role in Indian economy. About 20.5 million people depend upon livestock for their livelihood. Livestock provides livelihood to two-third of rural community. It also provides employment to about 8.8 % of the population in India. India has vast livestock resources. Livestock sector contributes 4.11% GDP and 25.6% of total Agriculture GDP. The vast majority of these livestock farmers produce milk (India is the largest milk producer country in the world), meat and other products without using much external input in a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable manner and distribution of livestock is more equitable that distribution of land. More than three-fourths of the labour demand in livestock production is met by women. However, livestock farmers/herders face multiple disadvantages in the form of lack of infrastructure facilities in rural areas like veterinary clinics and breeding centres, fodder and water, focus on exotic breed, decreasing pastures, and lack of institutional credit and insurance coverage besides climate change impacts on livestock are discouraging farmers from keeping livestock. Only 1 % of the total agriculture budget is allocated for development of the livestock sector,

Pastoral communities which are one of the major livestock keepers face special disadvantages. There has been little progress towards recognition of rights of the pastoral communities. Semiarid savannah grasslands (SSGs) which cover nearly a fifth of the geographical surface area of India are not only a vital life-giving source of the mobile pastoralism and transhumance but also home to precious and unique biological diversity of the country. They are in peril due to their categorization as “wastelands” in official government policy. About 20 million hectares of SSGs, have been diverted to other land uses, such as agriculture and plantations. In addition, grasslands are neither managed by the forest department, nor the agricultural department. The veterinary department which is concerned with the livestock does not focus on the very habitats on which the livestock depends, as their focus is mainly on sedentary, stall fed system. There had been more than 50 percent decline in the area of commons and grazing pasture lands in India which are quintessential for mobile pastoralism.

Recommendations

• Mapping and design programmes and policies for holistic development of CPRs and grasslands
• Extension of MGNREGA to the livestock keepers and integrating the need of water for livestock in the watershed development projects promoted especially in the rainfed areas of the country.
• Develop a national fodder policy and states’ fodder policies and design mechanisms for fodder production on commons, cultivable fallows and forest lands – Fodder development with the support of forest and revenue departments in every state in community-based, participatory-led approach,
• Creating new markets for livestock products – CSOs working with Raikas of Rajasthan and Gujarat has created new markets for camel milk by changing the policy and getting the approval of the FSSAI.
• Recognition of grasslands as unique habitats and asserting the customary grazing rights of pastoral communities over grasslands, alpine meadows and forests across the country.
• Discourage artificial insemination of indigenous livestock breeds with exotic/crossbreeds, and instead characterize, register and take measures to improve such indigenous breeds with allocation of enough funds.
• Acknowledgement of the indigenous knowledge of the pastoral communities and acknowledgment of the economic, ecological and environmental contributions of mobile pastoralism and transhumance at the policy level – through proper research and documentation.
• Technological innovation to improve the efficiency of draught power,
• Significant financial, human resource investments, in addition with research and development, technological innovation and infrastructure development to revive the domestic wool industry.
• Study on the issues related to pastoral women.
• Significantly increase the budget allocation for the livestock sector.

ADIVASI FARMERS

104 million of the worlds’ estimated 370 indigenous /tribal people live in India. According to the 2011 census, the population of Adivasis in the country is 10.43 crores, constituting 8.6% of the total population. 89.97% of them live in rural areas. India’s tribal population is overdependent on agriculture and forest-related livelihood sources. While 43 per cent of non-tribals depend on agriculture, 66 per cent of the tribal population survives on these primary sector livelihood sources. But in recent decades, the number of tribal farmers is coming down, and more are becoming agricultural labourers. In the past decade, 3.5 million tribals have quit farming and other related activities. Between 2001 and 2011 census reports, the number of tribal cultivators reduced by 10 per cent while number of agricultural labourers increased by 9 percent. (DTE, NOV 2018).

All of the 17 goals are relevant for Adivasi /Indigenous Peoples, but only 4 out of 230 indicators specifically mention Indigenous Peoples. These few indicators on which Indigenous Peoples are included do not reflect Indigenous definitions of well-being. For Indigenous Peoples around the world, ‘leaving no one behind’ means respecting subsistence economies and promoting non-monetary measures of well-being (IPMG, 2016).

The land loss and dispossession have been a significant feature of Adivasi livelihoods in the last two decades as per National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) surveys including the 66th Round (2009–10), 68th Round (2011–12) and 69th Round (2012), the Censuses of India etc. Data shows that the proportion of rural Adivasi households that do not own any land – not even homestead land – increased from 16 per cent of all Adivasi households in 1987–88 to 24 percent in 2011–12. Common property resources, which are very important to the livelihoods and survival of Adivasis, are an important part of the land wealth that has been lost by Adivasi households.

Recommendations

• Due emphasis needs to be given to the socio-economic benefits of forests and its multifunctionality. The forests are not simply genetic ‘resources’, but count as food or play a vital role in growing our food, such as the bees for pollination, and earthworms for regenerating soil fertility.
• The people whose food cultures are intrinsically linked to forests also need to be duly recognised. The National Forest Policy, 1988 acknowledges the symbiotic relationship between tribals and forests. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs needs to move forward on the proposed National Tribal Policy, which remain on the shelves. Many of the Scheduled Tribes (STs) listed in the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order, 1950 are forest-based. If
  people are not recognised then their dependency on forests could remain unaccounted for.
• An exclusive policy dedicated to Adivasi farmers is needed. Adivasi agriculture is vastly different and immensely diverse from mainstream agriculture. Research should be done to understand the effectiveness of traditional agriculture of Adivasi communities in the context of climate crisis.
• A separate MSP for produces of Adivasi farmers commensurate with the risk and ecosystem services provided by them would also help providing more nutritious food through the PDS, mid-day meals and the ICDS systems
• Implementing the 2030 Agenda with full respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples: By protecting and promoting the rights of indigenous peoples, as reflected in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, States will be able to address challenges faced by indigenous peoples and ensure that they are not left behind.
• Making indigenous peoples visible in data and in the review of the 2030 Agenda: At the national level, relevant indicators for indigenous peoples should be identified and included in national indicator lists. Data-disaggregation and recognition of indigenous identity in national statistics as well as integration of community-based data from indigenous communities will allow for assessing progress for indigenous peoples.
• Ensuring indigenous peoples’ participation in implementation, follow-up and review: Indigenous peoples can contribute to the development of national action plans, followup and review at all levels, including for the voluntary national reviews at the high-level political forum.