India's food dilemma: high prices or shortages

By Himangshu Watts

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - For a man who will inherit vast tracts of fertile farmland in Punjab, India's grain bowl, Jaswinder Singh made what seemed to him a logical career move -- he took a job with a telecoms company in New Delhi.

"I can't go back to the village after an M.B.A. Delhi has more money, better quality of life. The job is more satisfying, and you don't depend on the weather or prices set by the government," said Singh, who earns rent from his farm, while a tenant tills the land.

Singh's choice reflects a growing and worrisome trend in the nation's agriculture sector: Indian farms are failing to attract capital or talent, either from rich landlords like Singh, or the 21,000 students who graduate from India's 50 agricultural and veterinary universities.

"At present, most of the farm graduates are either taking jobs in the government, or financial institutions, or in private sector industry. They are seldom taking to farming as a profession," a report by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation said.

The views of the foundation -- set up by M.S. Swaminathan, who led India's Green Revolution in the 1960s that helped make this vast nation self-sufficient in food -- were echoed in a poll by the National Sample Survey Organisation, a government body. The survey showed 40 percent of Indian farmers would quit farming, if they had a choice -- an alarming revelation for a country where two-thirds of the billion-plus people live in villages.

SLOW GROWTH

India's farm sector has changed remarkably little since the advent of the Green Revolution, while other industries have been transformed over the past two decades. As a result, agriculture's share of the Indian economy shrank to 17.5 percent last year, from nearly 30 percent in the early 1990s.