With the assembly elections to five states done and dusted, and Assam and West Bengal in the bag for the BJP, Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided it was time to ask Indians to brace themselves for price shocks and other crises emanating from the war in West Asia. As always, the onus of sacrifice was on citizens — don’t buy gold, use less oil, work from home... All too familiar exhortations to exercise restraint and discipline and take patriotic responsibility.

He had one for farmers too: to “move to 50 per cent organic farming”. But is the switch such a cinch?

It takes seven to ten years to move from chemical-intensive agriculture to organic — or sustainable — farming. The transition, as this writer has learnt in conversations with tens of thousands of farmers across the country, comes with big risks and massive shocks — sudden drops in production, spikes in labour wages, pest attacks, uncertain inputs...

The consensus is that while productivity stabilises over time, change requires constant guidance and services that are not available in the market. While India has some 400 definitions of organic farming in different regional languages, the agriculture science fraternity has not yet adopted it as a system of production.

By and large, organic farming has spread in India through community-based organisations, NGOs and, in some cases, highly motivated individual farmers, rarely through public institutions or universities.

At first glance, Modi’s proposal to make a big switch to organic farming may seem ecologically sound. The crisis in Indian agriculture is real — farmers have had it rough for decades. Excessive use of chemicals has irreparably degraded soils, contaminated groundwater, reduced biodiversity and trapped farmers in expensive input-intensive systems. Few serious environmentalists would deny the urgent need for more sustainable agricultural practices.

Also Read: Brace yourself for a deluge of GM crops

The latest 2026 report by the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) and IFOAM Organics International shows that organic agriculture spans nearly 99 million........

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