Today, we give farmers 2.2 trillion rupees in subsidies on fertiliser, power, crop insurance, seeds, credit, irrigation and a myriad other items. We have a massive programme of procurement of grains at above market prices; we give highly subsidised food grains to 75% of rural population; and we offer guaranteed employment for 100 days to one adult in each rural household.

We run schemes that provide houses and LPG connections to rural poor and free primary education and free primary health care to rural households. Finally, substantial resources have been invested in bringing roads, digital connectivity and electricity to rural areas.

Yet, after seven decades of development effort, stories of widespread farmer distress remain a daily feature of our television programmes. Why?

It is tempting to hypothesise that since stories of distress capture viewer attention more readily than those emphasising positive achievements, media has a vested interest in focussing on them disproportionately. Given the vastness of India, there is always farmer distress in one or another of its corners, providing fodder for primetime television on a regular basis.

Given the human tendency to generalise from anecdotes, especially when they are presented in visual form, isolated incidents of suffering then get translated into generalised distress across the length and breadth of the nation. In contrast, hard data is costly to collect, difficult to digest and often loses to vivid images offered by specific stories even if they represent an exception rather than the rule.

While there is some truth in this hypothesis, in all likelihood, there is enough evidence to suggest that the stories of distress are real. Because India lost nearly four decades following the independence to poorly conceived policies, it remains a relatively low per capita income country. Within this broad scenario, agriculture has seen far slower progress than industry and services.

Over the 65 year period spanning 1951-52 to 2016-17, industry has grown at the annual average rate of 6.1%, services 6.2% and agriculture only 2.9%. The result of this asymmetry in growth rates has been that the share of agriculture in GDP has fallen from a hefty 53.1% in 1950-51 to just 15.2% in 2016-17.

By itself, this decline in share is neither unusual nor a reason for despair. It is an established stylised fact of growth that industry and services grow faster than agriculture with the result that the share of the latter sector in the GDP dwindles as the country grows rich in per capita terms. Today, the share of agriculture in the GDP is tiny in every country that has achieved high per capita income: 2% in South Korea, 1.6% in Taiwan, 1.5% in France, 1% in Japan and the United States, and 0.5% in the United Kingdom.

India’s tragedy is that, unlike these countries, it has not achieved a commensurate decline in the share of agriculture in employment. Today, employment share of agriculture stands at 5% in South Korea and Taiwan, 3.5% in Japan, 3% in France, 2% in the United States, and 1% in the United Kingdom. In contrast, the share of agriculture in employment in India remains stubbornly high at around 45%.

As a result, per worker output in agriculture today is just one-third that of the nationwide GDP per worker, which is itself low. On top, a gigantic 68.5% of operational holdings are smaller than one hectare. Per worker output on these tiny holdings is lower than per worker output within agriculture, itself one-third of the GDP per worker.

These facts imply that while the government can make improvements on the margin, it can do almost nothing within agriculture to create even a semblance of prosperity among farmers. Marketing reform, even if successfully implemented – and this is a big if – cannot go far. With the low per worker output, the scope for redistribution from a few rich traders to the vast numbers of farmers is quite small.

Increases in productivity cannot go very far either. India is already self-sufficient in food grains. Therefore, any increase in food grain output would pose a marketing challenge. Selling the extra output at home would depress prices while exporting it would attract countervailing duties due to WTO illegal subsidies via the MSP.

Diversification is seen as an option. But with fruits and vegetables accounting for just 5% of cultivated area and animal husbandry for just 5% of workforce, even doubling the output of these commodities within a short period would bring benefit to only a small proportion of the farmers while harming many others by sending prices into a tailspin. Processing and exporting the produce may help but only a small fraction of the associated benefit would accrue to farmers.

It is delusional to think that the next farm loan waiver or yet another clever government scheme aimed at farmer welfare would magically turn the situation around. The harsh reality is that with too little output and too many to share it, no solution within agriculture would drastically improve the situation.

We need to systematically remove obstacles – many of them erected by past policies – to the exit of the large number of marginal farmers from agriculture. Simultaneously, we must unshackle labour intensive sectors in industry and services to create good jobs for them.