It did not take the current round of farmers’ agitations to drive home the idea that India’s agrarian sector is under stress. Low growth, poor earnings and distress behaviour such as large-scale internal migration and disproportionately high suicides have signalled that something is wrong with the rural sector in India. Agricultural growth has been, on average, lower than that in non-agriculture, including industry; but the rate of decline of the population dependent on agriculture has been discouragingly low since employment outside of agriculture has not been growing fast enough. A rough calculation suggests that gross domestic product (GDP) originating in the “agriculture and allied sectors” category rose by about 21 percent in nominal terms between 2013-14 and 2016-17, while the agriculture dependent population would have risen by about 4 percent.