UPSC 2017: Comprehensive News Analysis - July 21

Current scenario of Indian Agriculture

• Indian agriculture is characterised by low scale and low productivity.
• About 85% of the operational landholdings in the country are below 5 acres and 67% farm households survive on an average landholding of one acre.
• More than 50% of area under cultivation does not have access to irrigation.
• Agriculture income generated is not adequate to meet farmers’ needs.

Increasing trends of debt burden

• The share of institutional loans disbursed to agriculture and allied sectors has risen from 9% in 2000-01 to 31.4% in 2015-16.
• The amount of short-term institutional loans for agriculture exceeds the total cost of inputs including hired labour. This indicates that a part of crop loans is spent on non-agricultural purposes.
• According to NSS surveys on Investment and Debt (NSS-I&D), loans taken by cultivators from non-institutional sources is rising faster than from institutional sources.
• Much of the growth in household demand in rural India has been debt-ridden and not supported by growth in income.

 Reasons:

• Modern agriculture requires investment in farm machinery and inputs like seed, fertiliser, agri-chemicals, diesel and hired labour.
• Savings generated from unremunerative crop enterprise are inadequate for such investments.
• Rising expenses on health, education, social ceremonies and non-food items put additional financial demand on farm families.

Loan waiver scheme

• States like Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab and Karnataka have rolled out farm loan waiver schemes for immediate relief to farmers.
• The demand for such measures is spreading to other States too.
• Ultimate goal is to lessen the debt burden of distressed and vulnerable farmers and help them qualify for fresh loans.
• The success of the loan waiver lies on the extent to which the benefits reach the needy farmers.

Drawbacks of loan waiver scheme

• It covers only a tiny fraction of farmers. According to 2012-13 NSS-SAS, 48% of the agricultural households did not have any outstanding loan.
• Out of the indebted agricultural households, about 39% borrowed only from non-institutional sources.
• The farmers investing from their own savings and borrowing from non-institutional sources are equally vulnerable, but are outside the purview of loan waiver.
• Provides only a partial relief because half of the institutional borrowing of a cultivator is for non-farm purposes.
• Many household has multiple loans either from different sources or in the name of different family members, which entitles it to multiple loan waiving.
• Loan waiving excludes agricultural labourers who are weaker than cultivators in bearing the economic distress.
• It severely erodes the credit culture, with dire long-run consequences to the banking business.
• Scheme is prone to serious exclusion and inclusion errors, as evidenced by the Comptroller and Auditor General’s findings in the Agricultural Debt Waiver and Debt Relief Scheme, 2008.

Implementation errors

• According to the CAG report, 13.46% of the accounts, eligible for the benefits under the scheme were not considered by the lending institutes while preparing the list of eligible farmers.
• In 8.5% of the cases, the beneficiaries were not eligible for either debt waiver or debt relief but were granted the benefits.
• Around 28% of the beneficiaries were not issued debt relief certificates which would have entitled them to fresh loans.

Other issues with loan waiver scheme:

• Implications for other developmental expenditure, having a much larger multiplier effect on the economy.
• A similar amount spent on improvement of agriculture infrastructure and other developmental activities would create a base for future growth and development of the sector.
• Loan waiving can provide a short-term relief to a limited section of farmers;
• It has a meagre chance of bringing farmers out of the vicious cycle of indebtedness.
• There is no concrete evidence on reduction in agrarian distress following the first spell of all-India farm loan waiver in 2008.

Sustainable solutions

• More inclusive alternative approach is to identify the vulnerable farmers based on certain criteria and give an equal amount as financial relief to the vulnerable and distressed families.
• Raise income from agricultural activities and enhance access to non-farm sources of income
• Strengthen the repayment capacity of the farmers by improving and stabilising their income.
• Improved technology, expansion of irrigation coverage, and crop diversification towards high-value crops are appropriate measures for raising productivity and farmers’ income.
• Another major source of increase in farmers’ income is remunerative prices for farm produce.
• More public funding and support
• Removal of old regulations and restrictions on agriculture to enable creation of a liberalised environment for investment, trading and marketing.
• States must undertake and sincerely implement long-pending reforms in the agriculture sector with urgency.

In news:

• A faecal sludge treatment plant (FSTP), started in Devanahalli in 2015 and now handles waste from 20,000 residences, could be a model for similar small-scale treatment plants across the country.
• The treated waste from the plant is being used to make manure for farmers in the neighbourhood.
• Many parts of India had phosphorous-deficient soil.
• Direct use of the waste could lead to contamination of crops, but if the sludge is treated and reused in poor peri-urban regions, it will help solve the waste management problem as well as provide nutrients to the soil

 In news:

• Researchers have found evidence that suggests the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians landed in the northern part of Australia at least 65,000 years ago.
• The finding, which was published in the journal Nature, pushes back the timing of when people first came to the continent by about 5,000 to 18,000 years.
• It also suggests that humans coexisted with colossal Australian animals like giant wombats and wallabies long before the megafauna went extinct.
• Previous archaeological digs and dating had suggested people migrated to Australia between 47,000 and 60,000 years ago.

Madjedbebe rock shelter:

• Human relics in this shelter dates back to 65,000 years.
• Relics found: Ancient campfire and archaic mortars and pestles, flaked stone tools and painting material, edge-ground axes- which are stone axes that would have had handles, which were 20,000 years older than those found anywhere else in the world.

Context:

• Researchers from the US-based Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP) collected samples from 530 birds in 18 poultry farms in Punjab and tested them for resistance to a range of antibiotic medications critical to human medicine.

Inference:

• They found high levels of antibiotic resistant pathogens in chickens being raised for eggs and meat in poultry farms in Punjab, posing serious health hazards for humans.
• Overuse of antibiotics for growth promotion in poultry is leading to development of drug resistance in humans, scientists have warned.
• Samples from the farms, which reported using antibiotic factors, were three times more likely to be multidrug resistant than samples from farms that did not use antibiotics to promote growth, researchers found.
• The team found reservoirs of resistance across both types of farms, but meat farms had twice the rates of antimicrobial resistance than egg-producing farms, as well as higher rates of multidrug resistance.

Highlights of UNAIDS report:

• For the first time since the global onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the scales have tipped in favour of patients.
• More than half of all People Living with HIV (PLHIV) now have access to HIV treatment.
• Globally AIDS-related deaths have almost halved since 2005.

New infections in India: India is the country where most new HIV infections are occurring in the Asia-Pacific region.

• The bad news is that the majority of the cases — nearly 95 per cent of the cases in 2016 — were concentrated in just 10 countries, India being one of them.
• India has 2.1 million people living with HIV, with 80,000 new infections annually, as of 2016. In 2005, the annual incidence was 1,50,000 people.
• Hurdles in India: access to medicines- insufficient availability and poor affordability of essential medicines.

India plays a special role:

• While the world seems to be on track to reach the global target of 30 million people on treatment by 2020, remains a major barrier and India plays a special role.
• Indian industries supplied nearly 90% of antiretroviral medicines in low- and middle-income countries in 2015

90-90-90 target:

The idea behind the 90-90-90 target is to diagnose 90% of people who are HIV positive; get 90% of the diagnosed HIV+ people on antiretroviral treatment, and 90% of those on antiretrovirals should be virally suppressed

Question 2. Consider the following statements with reference to Prime Minister’s Employment 
Generation Programme

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Question 3. Consider the following statements with reference to Biotech Kisan and Cattle 
Genomics Schemes:

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Question 4. Consider the following statements:

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Question 5. Consider the following statements:

See

GS Paper II

1. In your opinion, what strategy should India adapt to resolve its boundary stand-off with China at the Doka La tri-junction?

GS Paper III

1. Overuse of antibiotics in animal farms endangers all of us. Discuss?
2. “..farm loan waiver undermines an honest credit culture, it impacts credit discipline, it blunts incentives for future borrowers to repay, in other words, waivers engender moral hazard.” Comment.

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