Swaminathan

New Delhi, Sept. 27: India should try and shift farmers to non-farm jobs if it wants to battle poverty successfully, the country’s icon for agricultural research has said.

M.S. Swaminathan, considered the pioneer of the Green Revolution, called for a national effort to promote skilled non-farm employment in villages, citing China’s success in moving 100 million people from farm to non-farm jobs since the 1980s.

“We need a large non-farm initiative. People could move out of the poverty trap if there is value addition to their skills and labour,” Swaminathan told the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research on its foundation day yesterday.

He called on the CSIR to deploy some of its workforce to research the subject.

Swaminathan’s views are similar to those of Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who has stressed the need for industrialisation to combat poverty in villages. The scientist heads the Bengal government’s Agriculture Commission, which studies how to increase soil fertility and productivity.

Swaminathan told the CSIR that the rural, non-farm livelihood initiative may be started in the 31 districts the government has identified as agrarian hotspots because of the high numbers of farmer suicides there.

He added that an effort by the CSIR in the early ’70s to bridge the rural-urban divide had fallen short of expectations because there was little synergy at the time among the fields of agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries and industrial technologies.

In contrast, a programme begun by the Chinese Academy of Sciences about a quarter century ago had helped shift more than 100 million rural men and women in that country from farm to non-farm employment in seven years.

He said the strategy for rural prosperity in China included concurrent attention to on-farm and non-farm employment, which led to township and village enterprises.

“This was the beginning of the economic revolution in China. China’s ability to become a global outsourcing hub for manufactured products is largely due to the emergence of the township and village enterprises.”

Swaminathan, a plant geneticist who was director-general of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research during the 1970s, said the CSIR had an array of technologies relating to post-harvest processing and value addition, as well as biomass utilisation. These could be used to generate non-farm job opportunities.