Like much of the rest of the world, India has chosen the industrialisation path to progress, at the cost of agriculture. This trend has only accentuated since 1991, when Manohan Singh became the finance minister. On Monday, interacting with a group of editors, he stressed this approach and said: "The only way we can raise our heads above poverty is for more people to be taken out of agriculture."

In India, while manufacturing and services have been notching up very high growth rates, agriculture is stagnating or even declining. Industrialisation has led many western nations to prosperity, but is it the right prescription for India, which was (and to an extent remains) primarily an agrarian economy?

The prime minister’s latest remarks show where agriculture figure in the policy agenda – when food prices, food security and malnutrition among children are burning issues. When more people will be taken out of agriculture, they can expect no more than lowly jobs in factories that came up on agriculture land.

To remove poverty, does India need a renewed focus on agriculture? Is Gandhi’s small-is-beautiful, localised economy the right way for us? Or is there a middle way of calibrated industrialisation?