Anti-poverty fight­ers world wide have put an increased empha­sis on agri­cul­ture in recent years. It was once thought that putting a farmer into a job at a fac­tory was the ideal way to get the world’s poor out of poverty. But that strat­egy proved to be a fail­ure when the need for food and the num­bers of hun­gry increased.

From Time mag­a­zine we have this look at a sec­ond Green Rev­o­lu­tion tak­ing place in India. The Indian gov­ern­ment has been using money from the growth it has expe­ri­enced in recent years to improve farm­ing in the coun­try. Reporter Michael Schu­man explains some of the pro­grams going on in India.

When the indian national con­gress took power in 2004, Singh changed course and began an inten­sive effort to improve the lot of the nation’s farm­ers. Between the 2003-04 and 2008-09 fis­cal years, the cen­tral government’s bud­get for agri­cul­ture quadru­pled. Gov­ern­ment schemes built rural roads to help farm­ers get their pro­duce to mar­ket, for­gave some of their debts and raised min­i­mum pur­chase prices on cot­ton, rice and other crops. In 2005, pol­i­cy­mak­ers launched the Bharat Nir­man pro­gram, aimed at pro­vid­ing elec­tric­ity, hous­ing and irri­ga­tion sys­tems to the country’s farm­ers, and, a year later, the National Rural Employ­ment Guar­an­tee Scheme, which promised at least 100 days of work each year for poor farm­ing house­holds, often on public-works projects to develop infra­struc­ture in the coun­try­side. In the lat­est fed­eral bud­get, announced in July, funds allo­cated for the rural jobs scheme jumped 144% from the pre­vi­ous year to more than $8 bil­lion — mak­ing it the largest social-welfare pro­gram in the bud­get — while fund­ing for Bharat Nir­man was boosted by 45%. “It was very clear to us that if you want inclu­sive growth, it is going to require a sig­nif­i­cant increase in the pro­duc­tiv­ity of land,” says Mon­tek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chair­man of India’s Plan­ning Com­mis­sion in New Delhi.

Per­haps no sin­gle region of India’s vast hin­ter­land has received more con­cen­trated gov­ern­ment atten­tion than Vidarbha. One of India’s more dis­tressed farm­ing regions, Vidarbha became infa­mous for its high rate of farmer sui­cides. The prob­lem became so severe in 2006, when more than 1,250 took their lives, that Singh toured Vidarbha and announced a spe­cial $780 mil­lion devel­op­ment pro­gram for the area, which the locals refer to sim­ply as “the package.”

Three years later, K.S. Mulay, a state agri­cul­tural offi­cer based in the Vidarbha town of Amra­vati, proudly reads off a long list of the progress the gov­ern­ment has made so far. Nearly $39 mil­lion has been spent sub­si­diz­ing high-yield seeds, Mulay says, plus $24 mil­lion on devel­op­ing fruit orchards and other pricey pro­duce, and another $24 mil­lion on build­ing micro-irrigation projects. As Mulay dri­ves down nar­row roads through Vidarbha’s cot­ton fields, he stops his jeep every few miles to show off the government’s hand­i­work. First, he marches up a muddy hill­side to a small dam the gov­ern­ment built to help farm­ers pre­serve mon­soon rain­wa­ter — one of more than 9,000 con­structed in the region over the past three years. Next he vis­its the farm of Bhi­amrao Mahore, who received free orange-tree saplings from a state-funded nurs­ery. Mahore hopes his oranges will bring more money than the cot­ton he had planted before. Next stop is a state-sponsored train­ing ses­sion where scores of local farm­ers col­lect for a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion on how best to pro­tect crops dur­ing a drought. “We are try­ing to increase the income and pro­duc­tiv­ity of the farm­ers,” Mulay says. “All the work can­not be done in three years. But it is a beginning.”

And, for now, just that. Some Indian econ­o­mists crit­i­cize the gov­ern­ment for spend­ing too much on wel­fare pro­grams, such as the job-guarantee scheme, and not enough on irri­ga­tion sys­tems and other invest­ments that could make farms more pro­duc­tive. “Giv­ing a cow won’t help a farmer long-term,” says Pau­rn­ima Sawai, 42, a farmer in Takarakhede Shambhu vil­lage. “But money to build a dam is a long-term invest­ment. For years, you get ben­e­fits from it.” With only 40% of its farm­land irri­gated, India’s entire eco­nomic boom is held hostage by the unpre­dictable mon­soon. With much of India’s farm­ing areas suf­fer­ing from drought this year, the gov­ern­ment will have a tough time meet­ing its economic-growth tar­gets. In an August report, Gold­man Sachs pre­dicted that this year’s weak rains could cause agri­cul­ture to con­tract 2% this fis­cal year, mak­ing the government’s 7% GDP-growth tar­get look “a bit rich.” Even Thakare, with his pond, may not have enough water to plant his extra crops this year. Abusaleh Shar­iff, a senior fel­low at IFPRI’s New Delhi office, argues that allo­cat­ing money is only part of the government’s task. The farm­ers also need bet­ter train­ing, tech­nol­ogy and mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. “Do we have any of these? Almost none,” Shar­iff says. “The gov­ern­ment pro­gram needs to be improved, and we need to devote a lot more resources.”

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