Indian policymakers recently renewed an old call: move workers out of agriculture. It is good economics—the traditional path to prosperity involves a country’s labour force moving from farms to manufacturing and then to services. Except that in India, that transformation is already done to a large extent, at least among the young.
Such calls today ignore what has happened to the age structure of those employed on farms and what will happen if we push more people off them.
The median age of a farm worker in India in 2025 was 40 years. It has increased by five years over the last two decades. In some states, farm workers are even older. A typical farm worker in Kerala was 53 years old; and in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, 48. Even in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, a typical agricultural labourer was 40 years old.
In contrast, while the average services-sector worker was 35 two decades ago, she is barely a year older now. This is based on our analysis of Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data.
Between 2004-05 and 2025, the proportion of young adults (20-29 years old) who work in farming, mining and allied activities in India dropped dramatically from 35.4% to 18.3%. If we exclude animal husbandry, barely 13% of young adults now work on farms and other primary sectors.
Young workers have been leaving farms at roughly twice the rate of farm workers older than 30 years. This is a natural progression, since more young adults are highly educated and aspire to work in industry and especially services. During the last 20 years, among 20-29-year-olds, service-sector employment rose from nearly 20% to 28.7% and education enrolment doubled to nearly 12%.
Any call to move people out of agriculture today is in effect a call to accelerate a process of making farm workers even older, since those who will leave will invariably be young.
The country must mechanize farms more to improve productivity. But even with mechanization, someone must run a tractor, manage drip irrigation, read soil sensors and increasingly implement artificial intelligence-enabled solutions. That someone needs to be young enough to learn how technology is best put to use and then physically do it.
We do not need more young people on farms, but we do not need to push out those who remain either. We need to improve their earnings and make farming viable. Even among 30-plus year-olds in India, only about 21% were working on farms and mining in 2025, down from nearly 37% two decades ago.
Over the last 20 years, the share of Indians aged 30-plus working in animal husbandry, including dairy (mainly women), has tripled from about 3% to nearly 9%—or about 65 million people over the age of 30.
That is a large number of people who have left crop farming for animal rearing. This suggests that suitable jobs in the industry and service sectors in rural areas are few and far between.
Unemployment among young adults has nearly doubled to about 6%, and the share of people neither working nor looking for work remains near 27%. Also, more young people are staying in education longer, some of them surely because they cannot find suitable jobs after college graduation.
Pushing harder for an exodus of farm workers just adds more people to other primary activities and a job-seeking queue, while leaving the fields to an ever-older set of hands.
It may be true that in some states, young adults remain over-represented on farms—for example, about one in four in Madhya Pradesh. But the answer may not be to push them off farms. Instead, we need to make it easier for them to move to those parts of rural India where farm work pays well, largely in the south.
That means investing in migrant housing, easing cultural and social integration in destination states, making welfare entitlements truly portable across states and lowering hard physical labour via mechanization. In short, more re-allocation of farm labour within India, not less farm labour overall and not fewer young adults.
How do we make farming viable? The solutions are well known. First, mechanization, irrigation cover and the consolidation of fragmented plots into larger holdings to raise farm yields and output per worker.
At the same time, we must create greater demand for farm produce—incentivize India’s agro-processing industry to enlarge and add value, develop cold storage chains and nurture stable agricultural exports. If not, farm output prices will continue to remain volatile.
We also need to look at reforms holistically, since people’s decisions are interlinked. While the National Education Policy sets an official target of 50% of young people in higher education by 2035, policymakers now say that the future lies in imparting trade skills such as plumbing and electrical work.
One of us made this point in a 2023 oped, ‘Close the prestige gap to find takers for unfancied jobs.’ Similarly, our housing policy subsidizes home building on small rural plots, which discourages land sales and farm consolidation and, in turn, holds back agricultural productivity.
The shift that India needs is no longer away from agriculture, but in how we treat this sector. It should be viewed as an industry worth investing in. And that requires us to think of what’s best for farms, not just the shape of overall employment.
The authors are, respectively, Union Bank Chair professor of economics, Great Lakes Institute of Management, and assistant professor, Institute of Management Technology.