India, June 4 -- An analysis published in Hindustan Times on Monday shows that India's agricultural workforce has become older than its non-agricultural counterpart in the post-reform period. A very large part of this age gap is because of younger men giving up on farming even as elderly male workers and women continue to work on farms. This data is in line with intuitive wisdom. More and more blue-collar workers have left their villages (and farms) to work in the cities. Even in villages, farming as a source of income is getting marginalised by other professions. Agriculture, per se, is finding it difficult to support incomes as viability remains a problem, the climate crisis is becoming a major source of disruption, and land holding gets fragmented with each generation. Given this background, should one just ignore these statistics and think of them as the result of the obvious march of time? Not really, for this trend is of concern for at least three reasons. If agriculture is indeed becoming the second-grade profession in rural households - with the energetic and the enterprising not partaking in it - then it raises serious questions about the future trajectory of productivity growth and sustainability of farming. The problem was noticed by our policy makers in the approach paper on agriculture in the 12th Five-year Plan, which flagged the issue of labour replacing private investment becoming a drag on total factor productivity growth in agriculture. As India's food consumption basket changes towards perishables - horticultural products are now bigger than cereals in value of output - productivity and efficiency will become the cornerstone of agricultural incomes. It is one thing when workers get out of agriculture to high income sectors - what has been envisaged in things such as the famous Lewis Model in development economics - but another when they move from one kind of precarity to another. Most of the Indian blue-collar workforce is in the latter kind of situation, just slogging to earn incrementally better incomes in cities under abysmal living conditions. The fragility of this arrangement became clear from the massive reverse migration during the pandemic. The last red flag is regarding the trend of farm to non-farm migration flattening in the recent PLFS data. Is it because of the pandemic's disruption? Or is it the non-farm labour demand slowing compared to the past? If it's the latter, we should be even more worried....