Ten years ago, if not less, the frontier of farm mechanisation in India was limited to tractors or machines for harvesting paddy and wheat in the northern Green Revolution belt. There were the odd farmers who also deployed machines to transplant paddy saplings. But since 2004-05, annual tractor sales have zoomed from hardly 2.3 lakh units to nearly five lakh now, while the mechanisation universe has extended to even sugarcane harvesters and milking machines. The emergence of a market for herbicides to replace manual weeding operations is also, in a sense, a manifestation of the same phenomenon, although herbicides are not mechanical implements but chemical. New Holland Fiat India, in 2011, sold over 200 cane harvesters, each costing about Rs 1 crore, compared with 70 the previous year. All these reflect labour shortages that were earlier sporadic and confined to certain pockets, but have now become structural and widespread, as a growing economy has opened up alternate employment avenues in industry, construction and other services. Also, rural families increasingly want to see their children spending more time in school than in the farms. The spread of education, in turn, generates a disdain for manual labour, with the cane cutter's son not inclined to follow his father's calling — a choice the latter did not even have. If one additionally factors in the effects of MGNREGA and various other welfare schemes, the reasons for average farm wages in India more than doubling between 2004-05 and 2010-11 aren't hard to fathom.

These trends establish the inevitability of mechanisation. There are two issues here, both of which call for appropriate policy interventions. The first is technology. Mechanical harvesting of cane requires farmers to keep minimum 4-5 feet spacing between two plant rows, as against the prevailing norm of 2.5-3 feet. For that, suitable varieties and agronomic practices have to be developed to ensure yields do not suffer from planting lesser number of canes per acre. The same need to invest in research applies for cotton-picking: Mechanisation is not feasible unless plant heights are brought down to four feet, from the six-foot levels of the varieties grown here. Mechanisation also means boll opening has to be synchronised to enable a single picking. Indian growers, used to 2-3 pickings in a season, will not mechanise if that single picking yields less cotton.

The second, more obvious, issue concerns the small size of Indian farms and associated affordability problems. The Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh governments are currently giving 25 per cent subsidy on cane harvesters. Gujarat has pegged it at 50 per cent, while extending it to milking machines as well. The Centre, too, must pitch in to implement a wider national programme: A one-time capital concession on direct paddy-seeding machines is definitely more preferable to recurrent fertiliser subsidies. Besides, it should help promote a vibrant industry in providing farm equipment services. Farmers could outsource many of their field operations to these firms, so that they are left to simply ‘manage' their farms.

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