KEY POINTS:
Once upon a time India's top economists spent part of the year gazing upwards at the skies and waiting for the rains. Their complicated econometric models took second place to the annual monsoon rains that really determined the Indian economy's fate.
Good rains meant, first and foremost, food for those who could barely afford it. They also put money in the pockets of the rural folk and that meant better sales of everything from fertilisers to motorbikes.
As the Indian economy slalomed forward into the new century, those same economists suddenly discovered that they didn't need to be part-time weathermen. A poor monsoon no longer spelt famine and, in some years, the economy chugged along barely noticing that the storm clouds hadn't gathered above. Now we are all weathermen once again.
As global food prices shoot to record levels, all eyes have turned skyward waiting for the monsoon. A good monsoon will be like a bucket of water that will douse the fire of rising prices in India. It will bring wheat and rice prices back to earth. And that could give us a break from inflation which has shot up from 3.1 per cent in November to over 7.1 per cent now.
India's economy is still belting ahead at an impressive speed and the giant corporations are working on blueprints for huge expansion in the coming years. But agriculture has been in the dumps for the past 20 years and grew at a sluggish 2.3 per cent last year (that's compared with growth of around 8.7 per cent for the overall economy).
T N Ninan, editor of leading Indian business newspaper Business Standard, says agriculture is "in dire need of a second wind but has suffered a malign neglect".
The fact is that everyone talks about a second Green Revolution but it isn't about to burst forth from the soil in the near future.
Astonishingly there's a remarkably easy quick-fix to a big part of India's agricultural dilemma: pay the farmers more for growing wheat and other staple crops.
That needs a bit of explanation. The Government has always been the biggest buyer of wheat and it has always had a semi-monopolistic hold on the market. For obvious reasons, it likes to keep prices low.
That's great for the consumer but not too good for farmers.
Take a look at what happened last year. The Government's buyers swept into the market paying 1000 rupees ($31.80) per quintal (100kg) of wheat. A few months later, as food prices began rising globally, the Government hit the panic button and imported wheat at about 1500 rupees per quintal, riling farmers no end.
Understandably, India's wheat farmers have figured out a solution to their woes. They've been moving partly to cash crops that rake in more money.
In the western Indian state Maharashtra, for instance, many farmers have switched to growing grapes for the burgeoning wineries in the region.
In southern Kerala state, some agriculturists have switched to vanilla cultivation. In other parts of the country, farmers are trying their hand at growing chick peas, chillies and tobacco. Even in India's wheat bowl states of Punjab and Haryana, farmers are moving to everything from tomatoes - bought by large corporations like Pepsi - to barley for beer giant SABMiller.
A bit of history is needed to understand the Indian agricultural scenario. India has come a long way from the dark days when it had to literally go with a begging bowl to the United States.
In the 1950s and 1960s when the crops failed, India did not have the foreign exchange to pay for desperately needed food imports.
So the Americans stepped forward with PL 480 (Public Law 480) which was basically an emergency food bailout. The US assistance was perceived as deeply humiliating and any discussion on Indian agriculture will inevitably mention PL 480 and food "self-sufficiency".
But barely a decade later came the Green Revolution which altered the country's food scenario. Using what might today be called GM varieties, agricultural production went ahead in leaps and bounds. Famines became a thing of the past and Punjab became one of the country's richest states.
Oddly enough agriculture became almost a victim of its own success. With enough food to go around - at least theoretically as many still die of malnutrition-related ailments - the Government became complacent.
In fact, by 2002 it was facing a problem of plenty because it had a buffer stock of more than 60 million tonnes of wheat. Granaries were bursting and there was no storage space for more.
That picture has changed once again. The buffer stock is down to 20 million tonnes and the Government had to import wheat for the first time in six years in 2006. Also, as Indians get more prosperous and have more money in their pockets, they are buying larger quantities of wheat and rice so demand is shooting up.
One estimate by India's top agricultural scientist M S Swaminathan (he's also called the father of India's Green Revolution) is that the production of rice, wheat, cooking oil and pulses will have to double in the next two decades to keep pace with demand.
Fortunately, that's not as tough as it might sound. Indian farms, even after the Green Revolution, are less productive than their counterparts in China and far behind developed countries like the US and Canada. There's plenty of room for improvement in the more backward parts of India where fertiliser use is still low - especially if more irrigation facilities are created.
Is there the political muscle for the task? India's Agriculture Minister, Sharad Pawar, is, incidentally, the chairman of the Board of Cricket Control of India (BCCI) and he has frequently been accused of being more interested in cricket than agriculture.
But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is now emphasising the paramount importance of agriculture in one speech after another. Agriculture sustains "a significant proportion of our population and acts as a social safety net. Therefore, the health of agriculture is vital for sustaining our economic performance," he said at a recent rally.
Back in the 1950s about 70 per cent of India's GDP came from agriculture. Today that has fallen to about 20 per cent. But that doesn't change the short-term needs. This year if India has a good monsoon it will impact on prices around the world. Equally, a bad monsoon could send global wheat and rice prices shooting up even further.
