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The prosperous Punjabis can boast of no wealth other than their sturdy people and the land’s 30-feet-thick topsoil. In the crop year 2007-08, Punjab has produced 27 million tons of food grain on less than 1 million hectares of land, which is about 2 percent of India’s total cultivable land.
Producing that much food is no mean feat. The state has contributed 10.3 million tons of wheat to the central wheat pool this year.
Power and irrigation dams built about half a century back have provided water and power to the farmers, allowing them to grow a mountain of food. Punjab’s people are not only farmers but are also businessmen, technocrats and administrators. They have also been stalwarts against foreign conquerors for over a millennium.
For many centuries this land has been a battleground for all kinds of invaders from the West. Alexander arrived in Punjab in 325 BC, bent on the conquest of India, but he turned back when he and his soldiers found the going tough.
Muslim invaders arrived in the 11th century AD, resulting in 700 years of Muslim rule in India. They made Punjab their second home and converted about half the population to their faith. British conquered this land in 1845 and settled down to rule for another 100 years. Unfortunately for the Punjabis, the people who had converted to the Muslim faith separated from greater Punjab in 1947, along with their land. It was an upheaval never to be witnessed again in history.
The present Punjab is a shadow of its original glory. Despite its upheavals, it is prosperous; it is restive for progress and determined not to let in any more invaders. Hence a large number of young men have joined the Indian Army.
Punjab in India is an area less than half the U.S. state of Kansas, and is home to 27 million people. More than half follow the Sikh faith of Guru Nanak, a 16th century poet philosopher who simplified the prevailing Hindu philosophy and spirituality. Nine other Gurus further kept his teachings alive. The last of them, Guru Gobind Singh, also imbibed in its followers a spirit of self-sacrifice and active resistance to tyranny. At that time the people of Punjab faced a tyrant Muslim ruler.
After 1947, the people of India’s Punjab inherited a lackluster land, a very deficient irrigation system, an old feudal land ownership system and 6 million refugees. To make it worse, there were no communication systems of any kind in the state, except to serve the interests of the British government. It had purposefully spent money to build agriculture and irrigation systems in the Muslim half of Punjab, none in the other half.
For Punjab on the Indian side everything had to be built anew.
Today, Punjab’s agricultural statistics are mindboggling. What the Punjabis have done in 60 years is homage to their spirit and hard work. Land reforms were initiated in 1954. The Bhakhra and Ponga Dams, built to harness the rivers Sutlej and Beas, were completed in 1960 and 1966. Other major irrigation projects and flood control infrastructure were continuously built or upgraded over the last 40 years. As a matter of fact, U.S. agronomist Norman Borlaug initiated his Green Revolution in Punjab in the early 1960s. It then spread to other Indian states.
To be fair, there are other states in India that are contributing equally to the country’s growing prosperity. As a matter of fact, Uttar Pradesh is the largest food grain grower in India, followed by Punjab. Uttar Pradesh produced as much as 47 million tons of grain in the 2007-08 crop year. But it has four times as much land as Punjab and four times the population. Other notable states in food grain production in India are Andhara Pradesh, West Bengal and Haryana. The latter is comparable to Punjab in its agricultural achievements.
How did the Punjabis accomplish what they have done? Hard work is first and foremost, catapulting Punjab into a breadbasket. But Punjabi farmers’ adaptability to new technology and new ideas is a key element of the exponential rise in grain production.
Tilling the land with tractors on a large scale began in 1954, improved seeds arrived in 1958-62, the use of synthetic fertilizers became widespread in 1960 and the use of pesticides began in earnest in the 1970s. All along, the government stood by with electricity, training, research and a distribution system. No matter how faulty the distribution system appears today, it manages to cope with the mountain of food that arrives in April every year.
It is heartening to hear that farmers in Punjab, Western Uttar Pradesh and Haryana are achieving as much as 1 to 1.5 quintal (100-150 kilograms) of wheat output per acre. This is comparable to the output in Kansas, where mechanized corporate farming has been established for over a century.
Conditions in India in general, and in the food-growing belt in particular, are much hotter. Subsoil moisture, which sustains crops, stays high in the United States. Harsh hot weather in fall, summer and spring dries crops quickly if they are not irrigated. Hence a lot of attention is paid to getting water to the fields during the dry season.
If there is a serious failure on the agricultural front in India, it is not the hard work and crop-sustaining input but the debt trap that medium and small-scale farmers fall into. The main problem is the minimum support price – the price at which the government purchases wheat or rice for its central pool.
Private trading is forbidden during government purchases. This price is set low – for example, for wheat this year it is Rs. 1000 per quintal (US$28 per 100 kilograms). In private trade a farmer could fetch as much as Rs. 1600 (US$37).
The government argues that since it provides most of the input to the farms free of cost, its procurement price should be low. This is not acceptable to farmers, however. They quote – rather incorrectly – international wheat prices, which are high. They fail to consider that the West pays cash subsidies to farmers and then takes it away as personal, corporate and input taxes. Agriculture in India is completely tax-free.
Unfortunately all this progress in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh has come about at the high cost of depleting groundwater. It is a serious problem. Too much water has been pumped out of the ground aquifers, and soon they will run dry, leaving the farmers with nowhere to turn. Alarm bells are already ringing. Governments have banned any more tube-wells in specific areas. As long as existing tube-wells are running full tilt, they will pump out the pure water to the fields, creating a bigger problem a generation later.
In summary, the agricultural wonders achieved by the people of Punjab on very little land have sustained the granary of India. The equally prosperous people of Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh have done the same. All this progress in agriculture has allowed India to feed itself for the last 30 years.
India continues to import some grain, and to export a similar amount. This is a healthy trend, allowing the country to export its surplus and import whatever it is short of.
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(Hari Sud is a retired vice president of C-I-L Inc., a former investment strategies analyst and international relations manager. A graduate of Punjab University and the University of Missouri, he has lived in Canada for the past 34 years. ©Copyright Hari Sud.)
