A sticking point which could wreck the long-negotiated Indo-US trade agreement is protection of India’s farmers and rural sector. After almost eight decades of what our political leaders describe as fantastic national progress, India’s rural population of almost 1 billion dependent on agriculture and associated activities needs tariff protection against America’s 3.5 million farmers.

Despite the Indian subcontinent having a several millennia experience of agriculture and being an exporter of farm produce for centuries, if American wheat, maize and cooking oils are permitted without high customs duty, farmers fear India’s price uncompetitive rural farm sector will go bust. As a consequence for seven decades, India’s agriculture sector has been protected by high tariff and non-tariff barriers. This curious phenomenon requires explanation.

The immiserisation of rural India which until the mid-18th century was totally self-sufficient, indeed an exporter of agri-produce, began during almost two centuries of the British Raj. Time-tested multigrain cropping systems were forcibly replaced by the zamindari system under which cultivation of cash crops such as opium, tea, coffee, jute, was introduced on vast scale, and farmers were transformed into small plot tenants and/or rural labour paid pitiful wages.

After independence in 1947, instead of urgently addressing the devastation of rural India, under the stewardship of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, the country ill-advisedly adopted the Soviet-style heavy industry development model. Despite rural India supporting 80 percent of the national population at the time, its development needs were almost totally ignored. Rural primary-secondary education was singularly neglected as faithfully recorded by the independent Pratham Education Foundation’s Annual Status of Education Report. The latest ASER survey reports that eight decades after independence, over 50 percent of class VII children in rural primaries can’t read class III textbooks or solve simple math sums. Pervasive illiteracy has reduced farm productivity to among the lowest worldwide.

Neglect of foundational education in the populated hinterlands has been compounded by sustained failure to permit growth and development of a sizeable agri-produce and food processing industry. As a result, farm produce valued at Rs.90,000-100,000 crore rots before it gets to markets inadequately connected by road and rail connectivity immersing the nation’s farmers in perpetual debt and misery. In the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that India’s agriculture sector needs permanent protection against more efficient and productive farmers in the US and elsewhere.

If rural India is to ever become competitive and prosperous, substantial investment in foundational school education and growth and development of a viable food processing industry are essential preconditions. It’s a tragedy that independent India’s omniscient central planners and policy formulators have failed to write this simple prescription.