India’s Missing Input

In India’s interminable debates over agricultural prices, one constant is striking by its absence. Policymakers argue over fertiliser subsidies, diesel prices and monsoon forecasts with the precision of book-keepers. Yet the farmer, who absorbs the shocks of all these variables, is reduced to a cipher. In the spreadsheets that govern Minimum Support Prices (MSP), labour is a fixed input, assumed to endure endlessly.

The physical and mental toll of farming in form of the stress owing to inclement conditions, chemical exposure and chronic anxiety, barely registers in the minds of policymakers. It is an omission that sits uneasily with India’s ambition to become a developed country by 2047.

This neglect is not accidental. Classical economics has long treated labour as an abstract unit, interchangeable and inexhaustible. From Adam Smith’s pin factories to post-independence planning commissions, productivity was explained through land, capital and effort, not through the condition of the worker. In agriculture, the bias was even starker. The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, while transformative, was built on high-yield seeds, fertilisers, irrigation and not on the health of those who wielded them. The farmer’s body was assumed to cope.

Fragile Variable

That assumption is now untenable. Climate change has turned heatwaves into routine hazards. Pesticide exposure has become endemic. Rural mental-health distress is no longer anecdotal but measurable. And yet policy remains stubbornly mechanical. India insures crops against weather shocks, not farmers against physical collapse. It compensates for yield loss, not for human depletion.

In my years as an agricultural economist, I have been working to correct precisely this blind spot by rewriting the agricultural production function itself. Instead of treating labour (L) as static, “health capital” (H) should be introduced as a multiplier. Output, in this formulation, is not merely a function of seeds, fertiliser, water and labour, but of labour adjusted for health: Y = f(S, F, W, L × H). The intuition is obvious enough. A farmer weakened by illness or exhaustion is not the same economic agent as one in good health. What is radical here is that health is not a welfare add-on but a productive asset.

Uncomfortable Consequences

This reframing has uncomfortable consequences for existing policy. Take MSP. Current formulas, whether based on paid-out costs (A2+FL) or comprehensive costs (C2), do not account for what might be called ‘health depreciation.’ Labour-intensive crops such as cotton or sugarcane impose far greater physical strain than cereals. Ignoring this skews prices against those who bear the heaviest human cost. A health-adjusted MSP could justify returns 15–25 percent higher for such crops. The state already amortises tractors and tubewells. It simply refuses to do so for human beings.

The implications stretch beyond domestic pricing. India’s push to expand agricultural exports increasingly runs up against stringent sanitary and phytosanitary standards abroad. By embedding farmer health into the production calculus, safer practices become economically rational rather than morally aspirational. Reduced chemical exposure, better working conditions and lower residue levels would not only preserve health capital but also allow Indian produce to be marketed as ‘ethically grown.’ In rich-country supermarkets, that label increasingly commands a premium.

There is historical precedent for such a shift. During the industrial reforms of late-19th-century Europe, factory acts limiting working hours and improving conditions were justified not only on humanitarian grounds but on productivity. A healthier workforce was a more reliable one. India, by contrast, still behaves as if its farmers are infinitely resilient.

Insurance policy offers another illustration. Crop insurance schemes proliferate, yet they protect outputs, not the producer. Under a health-capital framework, extreme heat that incapacitates a farmer represents an economic shock akin to a failed harvest.

Sceptics will object that measuring health capital is complex, that it opens the door to bureaucratic inflation and fiscal strain. But complexity has never deterred India from designing elaborate subsidy regimes. What has deterred it is a reluctance to see farmers as more than instruments.

If India’s aspiration to be a $5trn economy is to rest on firm ground, it cannot be built on exhausted bodies. Development is not merely about higher yields or larger exports but about sustaining the people who make them possible. In the long run, the most precious resource in the field is not the crop, but the person behind the plough.

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