Around 70 per cent of over 6,000 marginal farmers engage in non-farm activities for income support, but 84 percent of them do not want to sell off their land to pursue other economic activities.
According to the study conducted by the Development Intelligence Unit (DIU), a collaborative venture between Transforming Rural India Foundation and Sambodhi, marginal farmers are largely engaged in non-agricultural activities like wage labour and livestock management to supplement their income.
Small and marginal farmers with less than two hectares of land holding account for a little over 86 percent of all farmers in India, but own just about 47 percent of the crop area, according to the 10th agriculture census 2015-16. The study, titled 'Annual Survey Of State Of Marginal Farmers In India', highlights that 84 percent of the marginal farmers in spite of low profits and natural calamities are not willing to quit farming, and are not interested in selling off their land to pursue other economic activities. Classifying it by landholding size, the tendency to reduce farming increases with higher land holding while those with the lowest landholding wish to continue with farming. According to the survey, 93.9 percent of the farmers with 0 to 0.5 acres of land and 81.39 percent with 2 to 2.5 acres prefer to continue farming.
In contrast, only 5.32 percent of the smallest landholding farmers and 14.76 percent of the largest landholding farmers want to reduce this activity. Around 10.99 percent chose to reduce it in due course, while only 2.77 percent wanted to leave farming altogether. “The responses are both contrarian, and absence of pathway shows the vulnerability of the marginal farmer livelihood portfolio, particularly when hit by pandemic-like shocks,” the survey said.
According to the data, Indian farms became more fragmented between 2010-11 and 2015-16, holdings continued to be inequitably distributed. During this period the proportion of small and marginal farmers grew from 84.9 percent to 86.2 percent, a growth of about 9 million, while the total number of operational holdings grew from 138 million to 146 million.
Further, these 126 million farmers owned 0.6 hectares holding each on average, which is not enough to produce surpluses which can financially sustain their families.