ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses why farmers’ welfare and prosperity has been eluding the policymakers and implementation agencies. It examines the presence of concern for farmers’ prosperity and welfare in the policy recommendations made by the past agricultural commissions, beginning with the Royal Commission 1926, in which for the first time a serious concern for ensuring the prosperity and welfare of farmers was shown by making its coverage mandatory in the commission’s recommendations. Whereas this committee recommended holistic development in rural areas with personal attention from viceroys and the governors and talked of overcoming centuries of inertia, the later policy documents went on relegating the concern for farmers’ welfare and prosperity. Despite repeating the word ‘welfare’ and ‘prosperity’ like rhyming words in every document, the schemes and programmes for development under various Five-Year Plans neither carried conviction nor had conceptual clarity in enabling farmers’ welfare. In this context, the divergence between reaching macroeconomic welfare development goals and the increasing marginalization of farmers to the extent of their dying by suicide is discussed in the theoretical analysis framework of welfare economics with reference to Pareto optimality and Prof. Amartya Sen’s point of view stated in his book On Ethics and Economics. In addition to this, the achievements of agricultural development during 1975–2000 as envisaged in the National Commission on Agriculture and reflected in the fourth Five-Year Plan and other Five-Year Plans until 2000 and between 1995 and 2015 were compared, covering all welfare – and prosperity-enabling development goals.
