Plan of Inaction

“I HAVE A DREAM,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said. “When India completes 75 years of independence, in 2022, we can double the income of our farmer brothers and sisters.” Modi was addressing a farmers’ rally at Bareilly in February 2016, and was hard-selling his government’s newly launched schemes for farmers. He framed it as an uphill task. To push through the initiatives, he said, he needed the cooperation of Indian states.

Farmers, a large constituency of voters in a distressed sector of the economy, had been a special focus for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Bareilly was the last of four Kisan Swabhiman rallies he had addressed across the country. In parliament, his ministers were doing their part. The day after the Bareilly rally, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley promised in his budget speech that the union government would reorient its priorities to ensure that Modi’s dream was achieved. But, beyond all this, the government’s hands were tied. Agriculture is a state subject, as enshrined in the Constitution’s Seventh Schedule—the cornerstone document outlining India’s federalist principles, which divides legislative powers between the union and state governments.

Somewhere in an office building on Sansad Marg, in central Delhi, Ramesh Chand got to work. Chand was a full-time member with expertise in agriculture at the NITI Aayog, the think tank that Modi had created two years earlier, to replace the time-honoured Planning Commission. (NITI, which means “policy” in Hindi, is a backronym for National Institution for Transforming India.) In April, Chand wrote an article for the Indian Express, titled “Why doubling farmers’ income by 2022 is possible.” He told me that he decided to write it to assuage the doubts people had raised about Modi’s promises. Articles in the media had noted that the idea was infeasible, especially since the government had failed to adequately address a severe drought the previous year, or to fulfill its campaign promises to farmers.

Addressing “critics and sceptics,” Chand offered six different aspects of the agricultural economy where improvements could help achieve the prime minister’s stated goal. Echoing Modi, he said that this was possible only if states implemented the union’s schemes. Chand and the NITI Aayog later contributed to an inter-ministerial task force that the government had set up, to formulate a plan for doubling farmers’ income.