Agriculture’s Blind Spot

The missing variable in India’s farm economics is the slow erosion of farmers’ bodies and minds.

Agriculture is usually narrated as a story of soil, seeds and rain. In policy papers and production models, land is measured in acres, fertiliser in kilograms and water in cubic metres. Labour appears, if at all, as a residual cost. What is almost never counted is the condition of the person doing the work. Yet on India’s farms, especially those growing labour-intensive crops, the health of the farmer is not a side issue. It is a core input into production, as decisive as irrigation or fertiliser, and far more fragile.

Spend time on sugarcane, cotton or paddy farms and this becomes obvious. Crops such as sugarcane, rice, wheat, mango, cashew, vegetables and cotton generate high gross returns, but they demand relentless physical effort. Bending, cutting, carrying, spraying and harvesting over months leaves bodies worn and minds frayed. The economic system records the output, but not the erosion of the person producing it.

Uncounted Costs

Take sugarcane, a flagship crop in much of western and southern India. On a single acre, a farmer may put in around 80 full labour days in a year, in addition to buying seeds, fertiliser and irrigation. According to the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) Cost of Cultivation Report for 2024–25, these visible inputs add up to roughly Rs. 70,000 per acre. That is what the books show. But when one factors in what can be called ‘Farmer Health Capital depreciation’ – which is the cumulative physical and mental strain of repetitive, exhausting work - the true cost rises by about Rs. 16,000 more. This estimate draws on the NSSO daily wage of Rs. 350 and on occupational-strain research (Bharati et al., 2019; Ramesh et al., 2021). In other words, nearly a fifth of the real cost of growing sugarcane is being silently absorbed by the farmer’s body.

Cotton tells a similar story. Pest management, weeding and manual harvesting demand sustained, often back-breaking effort. In regions such as Vidarbha, where smallholders dominate, a single acre can exhaust an entire household over the season. If cultivation costs are adjusted for health loss, they rise by 15–20 percent, even if gross income remains unchanged. Traditional farm accounting, which focuses on cash outlays and ignores bodily wear and tear, simply misses this hidden burden.

Bringing health into the production function changes the way agricultural economics looks. Farmer Health Capital is best thought of as a stock—like soil fertility—that diminishes with intensive use. Health in the production function is a flow, influencing how much effective labour a farmer can supply at any moment. A fatigued, injured or depressed farmer produces less, just as surely as a field with depleted nutrients yields less grain.

Formally, output can be written as Y = f (S, F, W, L × H), where S is seed, F fertiliser, W water, L labour and H the health-adjustment factor, which lies between 0 and 1 (P. J. Patil, 2026). When H falls because of chronic pain, illness or mental strain, effective labour falls with it. This makes health not a soft social variable but a measurable economic input, one that can be priced into the true cost of cultivation.

Uncomfortable Implications

The implications for India’s minimum support prices (MSP) are uncomfortable. MSP calculations today account for paid-out costs and imputed family labour, but not for health depreciation. If sugarcane and cotton were priced with this in mind, MSPs would need to rise by perhaps 15–25 percent to reflect the real value of farmers’ effort. That would not merely be a fiscal transfer. By making exhausting crops more expensive, it would nudge farmers and governments towards mechanisation, crop diversification and techniques that reduce physical strain.

India’s chronic agrarian distress and high rates of farmer suicide cannot be understood only through income statements. Many farmers keep going under extreme strain even when earnings look adequate on paper. By ignoring health deterioration, policymakers miss what might be called ‘silent distress’ or the slow accumulation of pain, fatigue and anxiety that can precede chronic illness or mental-health crises (NCRB, 2023; ICSSR, 2021). Tracking Farmer Health Capital could therefore act as an early-warning system, flagging households and regions where intervention is needed before tragedy strikes.

None of this requires mystical new economics. It requires acknowledging what is already visible in the fields: that farming is not just an interaction between land and technology, but between human bodies and unforgiving tasks. Counting the invisible cost of health is not an academic flourish. It is a prerequisite for making Indian agriculture sustainable and humane.

(The writer is a member of Maharashtra Agriculture Price Commission. Views personal)