National Commission on Farmers (M.S. Swaminathan Report)

The National Commission on Farmers (NCF) was constituted on November 18, 2004 under the chairmanship of Professor M.S. Swaminathan. The Commission was tasked with understanding the cause of farmer distress and rise in farmer suicides. NCF was mandated to frame a medium-term strategy to ensure universal food security by enhancing productivity, profitability, and sustainability of major farming systems in the country.

• The Swaminathan report made policy recommendations under land reforms, irrigation, credit and insurance, food security, employment, productivity of agriculture and farmer competitiveness. The report also recommended the subject “Agriculture” to be inserted in the Concurrent List of the Constitution.
• The Swaminathan Commission identified certain causes for farm distress. These are:
  • Unfinished agenda in land reform
  • Quantity and quality of water
  • Technology fatigue
  • Access, adequacy and timeliness of institutional credit
  • Opportunities for assured and remunerative marketing
  • Adverse meteorological factors aggravate these problems
• The commission concluded that farmers needed to have assured access and control over basic resources including land, water, bio-resources, credit and insurance, technology and knowledge management, and markets.

The major recommendations of the committee include-

• To distribute ceiling-surplus and waste land among farmers: The share of the bottom half of the rural households in the total land ownership was only 3 per cent and the top 10 per cent was as high as 54 per cent. One of the demands of the agitating farmers today is that they should be made the owner of the land they have been tilling for years.
• To prevent diversion of prime agricultural land and forest to corporate sector for non-agricultural purposes.
• To ensure grazing rights and seasonal access to forests to tribals and pastoralists, and access to common property resources.
• To establish a National Land Use Advisory Service: This would have the capacity to link land use decisions with ecological, meteorological and marketing factors on a location and season-specific basis.
• To set up a mechanism to regulate the sale of agricultural land, based on quantum of land, nature of proposed use and category of buyer.
• To give farmers a minimum support price at 50 per cent profit above the cost of production classified as C2 by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP).