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What will this perfect fictional land in the economics textbooks look like in the future?

Almost everyone who has passed 9th standard from a CBSE school with NCERT textbooks has heard the name of this village. Palampur is a near-perfect hypothetical village, where necessities and facilities are available and everything works in harmony, well, almost everything. It’s not that everyone is equal in terms of living standards or that happiness is omnipresent, but the 450 families that live there are content.

Let’s just get this out of the way, that Palampur is not just an imaginary place in your books, it is an actual village in the Kangra Valley, Himachal Pradesh. The hill station is known as the tea capital of the Northern region. But, all the views and predictions here are extrapolations but based on the similar pretext of NCERT books.

Let’s just do a quick recap of what economics was like in Palampur, to see the contrast of the perfect village in the future. Agriculture is the main activity in Palampur, with 75 per cent of villagers depending on it, with manufacturing, dairy, handicrafts, and transport as the secondary sectors. Now as Palampur is well-connected with other towns via good transportation, it also has well-developed irrigation, healthcare, education, and electricity. These all contribute to the living and happiness index of even the people who earn their livelihood through farming.

Diving into the agricultural aspect, we find that since 1960, the farmlands are fixed in Palampur, there has been no change or expansion inland areas for residential or cultivation. At that time, the barren land of the village was converted into cultivable work, and there is no scope to increase production by making the new land cultivable.

The crops are grown according to the seasons, distinguished as Rabi (winter season) and Kharif (rainy season) crops. Out of the produce, some portion is kept for consumption by the family of the farmer, and the surplus is sold in the market. And due to good irrigation, and the availability of electricity, the product is high in quality and quantity. Also, because of fertilizers and manures, using modern farming techniques, leads to higher fertility of the soil, hence farmers can grow two to three crops per year, called multiple cropping.

The introduction of the Green Revolution in 1967, paved the way for even more modern method applications in Indian farming. High Yield Variants (HYV) seeds were introduced, which were scientifically proven to deliver more quantity than before. But with regular use of HYV seeds which need a lot of water, the groundwater level dropped considerably, and overuse of chemical fertilizers led to the reduction of infertility of the soil. These problems were the cause of the depletion of natural resources, which now was beyond our control.

Now, the other challenge posed by using modern farming methods is the requirement of a high budget and greater capital investment, which most farmers in Indian villages lack. So the farmers either borrow money amongst each other on some guarantees or from rich moneylenders in the village. They also, at times, take help from the traders in the form of advances. These sources of money come with having to pay a high rate of interest against such loans. However, money borrowing is only amongst small farmers because big farmers have their savings from farming. But, those small farmers who are unable to repay, go on to be burdened by these debts and lose their lands or produce to the lenders.

So, what will the drastic changes look like in a village like this, and how will it affect the people living there?

Let’s choose the year 2050. So, as per statistics of food consumption, and population growth, the demand for food will increase by 70 per cent, which requires that much more productive. Now, obviously, the world works on a principle, and it won’t change in such a short time, so more than 8 per cent of the population will still be undernourished. The problem of wealth distribution is just going to go on getting bigger, and the capitalists will make sure that the gap increases beyond recognition of the poor. Unlike Palampur, where even the poorest natives can strive, survive and grow, at a decent pace in life, the future version of these villages won’t be so sympathetic towards them.

Now about agriculture, which used to be one of the major employers in villages similar to Palampur would be affected due to modern farming equipment and techniques. High-performance robots and heavy-duty machines will replace workers with less productivity at lesser costs. And as far as the availability of fertile cultivable land is concerned, it’s not going to reappear after decades of overuse of chemical fertilizers and intense crop rotation, hence the pressure to find it will be burdensome. The future of agriculture will be a grim reality if government planners and every stakeholder of different influences come together for sustainable solutions which support the efficient use of resources and marketing, and help in the reduction of intermediaries in the market.

For cost-effective technologies with a focus on environmental protection and on conserving our natural resources, we would need to change to vertical and precision farming techniques. These soil testing-based methods which use AI to determine which crop to sow for best results will help decide the farmer’s produce. Also, gene editing and nanotechnology will enhance food quality, and trigger a much wider variety of plant-based crops. The use of GPS and satellite aerial imagery will ease the task of keeping track of the crop’s growth and wellness on a much larger scale.

While these predictions can shed light on the future, we are still several years away from 2050. A whole new generation of growers, and agriculturists who are not yet born, will be farming midcentury, and much will happen between now and then that we cannot predict.

Other than that, acquisition of these technologies will need money, and with our country turning into a developed country in some decades is expected to increase the average income of citizens. And as the banking channels integrate seamlessly into the country’s finances, loan syndication for productive purposes will get even easier. Also, improvement in internet connectivity with an increase in the number of people using it will push the government and NGOs to spread awareness and information about agriculture reforms. Taking everything into consideration, there’s a lot of developmental areas to cover to reach a sustainable and modern Palampur by 2050. We can only hope we don’t turn the image of our present-day villages into something irrecognisable over these years. This is not to say, that we shouldn’t modernize, it’s just to remember the roots of what villages like Palampur represent — a place living in the past with the hope of some certainty in the happiness of the residents in the future. Let’s work with each other so that the thousands of Palampur-like villages in India grow at a viable pace and get their due credit for their contribution to our country.