It has often been seen that the discussion on the crisis of Agricilture in India revolves around market mechanism and failure to modernise machinery. However, many a times the failure of the agriculture sector lies in the pesticide sector which has been heavily unregulated and underpenalised for the ill effects that it’s had on farming in general and ther farmers in particular.
Anamolies of the pesticide sector include-
1. The older bills target the manufacturer for any kind of failure on part of the pesticide. While this may seem like the right thing to do, often the manufacture is routed out to small scale enterprises and not the MNCs, who become impossible to hold accountable under this bill.
2. The pesticide sector has a powerful lobby where the misuse of fertilisers is blamed on the farmers and not the unsupurious and bad quality fertilisers which are mislabeled and sold- leading to ambiguity in thier use procedure.
3. The fertiliser sector isn’t accompanied with changes according to the situation on the ground. Therefore, subsidised fertilisers may not necessarily be the ones that are to be used on such soil and with certain crops.
The insistence of various farmers lobbies on including various stakeholders and the NITI AAYOG while debating the Pesticide Management bill is definitely a step in the right direction. The focus should be on-
1. Management and sale of properly labelled and regulated pesticide
2. An emphasis of information dessimination
3. Affixing proper accountability in the sector.
CONCLUSION:Therefore, there is a lack of information dissemination that exists on ground. This makes agriculture all the more crisis prone and the farmers much more vulnerable.
