I wonder how you came to this conclusion. In fact, farming in India is very fragmented. Lot of farmers or people in rural areas own very small parcels of land and work on them. Yes, there are people or families which own large pieces of agricultural land, but not in the numbers that you seem to imply.
Also, lack of manpower for working on farms is a very real problem in India. Farming jobs still exist at a big scale in India because we don't have mechanization like western countries(Again because of fragmentation of farms). People are not willing to "slave around" in farms anymore because they get subsidies from government i.e. food at very low cost for people below BPL. And it is very easy to get a BPL card if you live in rural area. This comes from someone(me) who has worked and been around farms and is still involved in farming though not directly on a day to day basis.
>>Also, lack of manpower for working on farms is a very real problem in India.
That's not a problem, that's a solution. Nobody should do a job that doesn't work for them.
That’s really a lot of people if think about it. That’s 365,000 people a year. If a new city was built for all those people, in France it would be the 5th largest city.
That scarcity is completely artificial though. Wealth and income inequality make this obvious and they are the problem. A different social organisation could allow for everyone to have enough and probably make society less wasteful too.
While this is true. The true problem really is the population scale is just too much. At that point everything breaks.
We really are a society of extreme scarcity. There could be enough for everyone, but there are just too many people. People do the obvious and optimize to no end for personal profit. At one point in time people thought the government is corrupt, or that government jobs automatically come with corruption. At that point in time around late 80's there was a sentiment private jobs and enterprises would come along and solve all this. Something like the exact opposite happened. Almost every company I've worked I have seen politics and corruption to no end for foreign travel opportunities, pay rises, equity and promotions. This automatically creates a situation where merit can never win. You can start all the start ups you want but if you can't solve this problem its just attempting to build a pyramid on quick sand.
>>I don't understand at all the increasing rents, property prices amidst the impending crisis.
Why don't you understand this?
Settling in cities is the only hope for a decent job currently. Farming jobs are long gone and are not profitable for a long time. Most farms lands are owned by a few families and the remaining people just slave around on that. For those people the only escape is to start a small shop or get some education and get a job in the city. So those people will keep coming to cities. And we can only develop a few cities as we don't have enough tax collection to build and develop all over. This concentrates people into a few cities.
Now you have a high demand and low supply situation. There fore high rents and property prices.
Ideally if you had good transit then you could expand to outskirts and increase supply. But some 1000 people come to a city like Bangalore everyday, and there isn't enough tax money to build that sort of infrastructure.
>>Given that, especially, only a handful hoard most of the wealth and could afford buying or renting at today's rates.
If you start early, save and invest well, you could establish unbeatable lead over your colleagues. In a society like India where things are so scarce this is even more so true.