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Shaping up the New Countrysides

Mutual Concerns

Arvinder Singh is in Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 29, Rajpur Road, Delhi-110 054 India. E-mail: arvinder999{at}yahoo.com

There has been a tendency in transitional economies, in recent times, marked by faster global integration and the rise of highly visible high-tech industrial sectors of the economy, to see agriculture more as a pre-modern drag than a contributor, right kind of noises and concerns for food security notwithstanding. India, China and Russia, in that order, must realise that agriculture will continue to be around in its present form for a much longer time than they would wish. The manufacturing industrial sector is likely to coexist with a large population persisting in agriculture. Obsession with a certain kind of ‘modern’ industrialisation, mistakenly attributed to the West, and impatience with agriculture will not help. Nor will technocratic solutions to agricultural problems. For instance, large scale mechanised farming may neither be inevitable nor necessarily desirable. Nor may the labour transfer from agriculture to non-agriculture be as quick as expected. It is in this context and on the basis of a far more solid understanding of each other's economy than what the existing state of affairs suggests that cooperation between India, China and Russia needs to build on.

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