Why the increase in farm worker population is a worry
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Between 2017-18 and 2023-24, the number of Indians working in agriculture rose by 68 million. As Himanshu, an associate professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, pointed out in a recent Mint column, this is a reversal of the trend between 2004-05 and 2017-18, when this number declined by 66 million.
The backdrop of erratic wages and declining productivity makes this particularly worrying. As economies grow and get richer, the share of agriculture in both economic output and workforce tends to decline. This has been seen across the world since the industrial revolution in the 18th century.
In India, while farms’ share in gross domestic product (GDP) declined steadily over decades, the pace of decline in the share of agricultural workers in the workforce was slower. This trend has now reversed and worse, gathered pace. The bulk of this increase has come from states that are among the poorest economically and have large agricultural populations, such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.
Further, almost this entire increase has been driven by women workers. Many analysts have attributed this increase to covid-19, when workers desperate to find employment to support themselves returned to family farms. This trend was expected to reverse after covid lockdowns ended and the economy returned to ‘normal’.
That the agricultural workforce has increased by an estimated 25 million in 2023-24 alone, when GDP grew by 8.2%, is deeply worrying. This is because workers earn much less in agriculture, a sector where worker productivity also trails the national average. While the estimated number of men employed in agriculture rose by just 1.4 million between 2017-18 and 2023-24, the number of
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