Agricultural Performance under NDA-II (2014-20): Challenges and Outcomes

Ask any agricultural economist what happened to Indian farming between 2014 and 2020, and you will hear two contradictory things in the same breath. Foodgrain output hit record highs. Farmers still struggled. This is the paradox of India’s agriculture under the National Democratic Alliance’s second term (NDA-II): a period of ambitious promises, back-to-back droughts, and a growth rate that never quite matched the scale of its own targets.

A growth story that fell short of its own benchmark 🔗

The number most often used to sum up this period is 2.3 per cent, the average annual growth rate of agriculture during NDA-II’s five years in office, according to IGNOU’s study material on India’s agricultural growth patterns. That figure has been described as the lowest since the era of economic liberalisation began.

Other estimates paint a slightly less grim picture depending on what exactly is being measured and over which years. The Economic Survey placed the annual growth rate of agriculture and allied sectors at close to 2.88 per cent between 2014-15 and 2018-19, with growth staying largely static across those six years. A separate long-run study of India’s agricultural economy found that the crop sector specifically grew at only about 2.4 per cent a year between 2014-15 and 2019-20, a noticeable slowdown from the 3.4 per cent annual growth the same sector had managed in the preceding decade.

Whichever figure one uses, the direction is consistent: growth decelerated compared to the “recovery period” of 2004-05 to 2013-14, when agricultural GDP had climbed closer to 4 per cent a year. That earlier momentum did not carry through into NDA-II’s tenure, and the reasons were not entirely of the government’s making.

Two droughts in a row set the tone early 🔗

NDA-II’s very first two years in office coincided with a monsoon crisis. India recorded a 12 per cent rainfall deficit in 2014-15, followed by an even sharper 14 per cent shortfall in 2015-16, based on data presented by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare to the Rajya Sabha. This was the first time since the early 1970s that India had faced two consecutive drought years of this magnitude, and it hit output hard.

In 2014-15 alone, deficient monsoon rainfall combined with unseasonal showers to pull down the production of cereals and pulses sharply, with pulses production falling by close to 47 per cent over the previous year in some assessments. Regions such as Marathwada in Maharashtra bore the brunt, with several districts reporting repeated monsoon failures across three consecutive years, forcing farmers to skip sowing the kharif crop altogether in parts of Latur and neighbouring areas.

A brief recovery, then another slowdown 🔗

A good monsoon in 2016-17 offered temporary relief, pushing agricultural growth up to around 6.3 per cent that year according to the eGyanKosh study material referenced earlier. But the recovery did not hold. Growth slipped again to roughly 3 per cent in 2017-18, illustrating just how tightly Indian agriculture’s fortunes remained tied to rainfall, despite decades of investment in irrigation. This volatility, more than any single bad year, is what kept the five-year average stuck below 3 per cent.

The big promise: doubling farmers’ income by 2022 🔗

It was against this uneven backdrop that Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced, at a farmers’ rally in Bareilly in February 2016, a goal of doubling farmers’ income by 2022. To work out how this could be achieved, the government set up a committee under Ashok Dalwai, then an additional secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, in April 2016. The committee’s 14-volume report, submitted in September 2018, laid out a detailed roadmap and set a concrete benchmark: the average farmer household’s income needed to rise from about ₹96,700 in 2015-16 to nearly ₹2,43,000 by 2022-23.

To hit that target, farm incomes would need to grow at a compound annual rate of around 10.4 per cent, factoring in gains from crop productivity, livestock, better resource use, higher prices, cropping intensity, diversification into high-value crops, and a shift of surplus farm labour into allied and non-farm activities.

Why the arithmetic never quite added up 🔗

The scale of that ask becomes clear when set against the actual growth agriculture was delivering. Historical income growth had hovered closer to 3.5 per cent a year, roughly a third of what the doubling target required. By the time the deadline approached, independent assessments were already flagging the target as unlikely to be met on schedule, since agricultural GDP growth of 2-3 per cent a year could not realistically translate into anything close to double-digit income growth for farming households. This gap between the ambition and the underlying growth trajectory became one of the defining tensions of the period.

The policy toolkit: price support and market reform 🔗

None of this is to say NDA-II sat idle. Several significant policy interventions were rolled out during these years, aimed squarely at farm incomes and market access.

Minimum Support Price at 1.5 times cost of production: The Union Budget of 2018-19 formalised a commitment to fix the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for all mandated crops at a minimum of one and a half times the cost of production, guaranteeing farmers at least a 50 per cent return over their input costs, as confirmed by the Ministry of Agriculture’s official clarification on MSP calculation. This translated into the steepest MSP hikes of the government’s tenure for the 2018-19 kharif season, when paddy support prices alone rose by 13 per cent.

Market reforms: The electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) was launched to create a pan-India digital platform linking mandis and allowing farmers to sell to a wider pool of buyers, reducing dependence on local intermediaries. Alongside this, the government circulated a Model Agricultural Produce and Livestock Marketing Act in 2017, urging states to loosen restrictive APMC regulations that had long confined farmers to selling within notified local markets.

Direct income support: The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN), launched in February 2019, offered eligible farmer families a direct annual transfer to help cover input costs, delivered without intermediaries through the Direct Benefit Transfer system.

Risk mitigation: The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana expanded crop insurance coverage, intended to cushion farmers against exactly the kind of drought and unseasonal weather shocks that had defined the early NDA-II years.

Output records amid growth-rate disappointment 🔗

It is worth noting that these interventions did coincide with some genuine production milestones. Total foodgrain output touched a record 296.65 million tonnes in 2019-20, comfortably ahead of the previous year’s figure. The apparent contradiction, record output alongside a disappointing growth rate, is explained by the fact that growth rate calculations measure the pace of change against a base year, while absolute output records simply reflect cumulative gains, including those from a low base after the 2014-16 droughts.

Growth patterns in perspective: how NDA-II compares 🔗

Placing NDA-II’s record alongside earlier phases of Indian agricultural growth helps clarify how much of a departure this period represented.

The table makes the underlying story visible at a glance. NDA-II inherited a sector that had been accelerating through the previous decade, only to see that momentum interrupted by consecutive droughts early in its term. The policy response, MSP hikes, digital market reform, direct income transfers, and expanded insurance, was substantial in scope, but it was working against a growth rate roughly a third of what the government’s own income-doubling target required. The gap between ambition and outcome, rather than any single policy failure, is what defines this chapter of India’s agricultural history.

What do you think? Do you think weather-driven volatility or structural issues like fragmented landholdings and weak market access were the bigger constraint on Indian agriculture during this period? And should farm income targets be built around achievable growth rates rather than aspirational ones?

References

1. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/84865/3/Unit-13.pdf
2. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/agriculture/economic-survey-2019-20-agriculture-growth-stagnant-in-last-6-years-69076
3. https://reliefweb.int/report/india/drought-india-2015-16-when-coping-crumbles-rapid-assessment-impact-drought-children-and-women-india
4. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/agriculture/in-depth-coverage-drought-54343
5. https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/govt-says-committed-to-achieving-target-of-doubling-farmers-income-by-2022-119121301199_1.html
6. https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/panorama/as-2022-approaches-goal-of-doubling-farm-incomes-remains-elusive-1018426.html
7. https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=199776&reg=3&lang=2