Farmers have become a burden on the country. Their plight is deliberate.

There is trouble on the farm front. With untimely rains accompanied by hailstorm and strong winds showing no signs of relenting, further deepening the prevailing agrarian crisis; and with the spate of farmer suicides on the rise, agriculture faces its worst ever crisis. While the rising number of farmer suicides is only a reflection of how fragile the agrarian economy is, the entire focus is on providing adequate relief and compensation to farmers who suffered crop losses.  

In this bargain, the real issues confronting farming are once again being sidelined. Once the rains are over, the relief is distributed, and the nation’s attention shifts to how much is the loss in crop production and the resulting impact on food inflation, farmers will once again be forgotten. This has been the travesty of farming all these years, and it is primarily for the deliberate neglect and apathy that agriculture continues to bleed. 

The intention is very clear. With the Centre conveying to the Supreme Court its inability in providing farmers with 50 per cent profit over the cost of cultivation, farmers are being left in the lurch. They are expected to fend for themselves, and face the vagaries of the markets once the Government begins to withdraw the minimum support price (MSP) for wheat and paddy. Economic Survey 2015 has made this amply clear.   

Farmers have reasons to feel betrayed. After a high-pitch election campaign a year earlier when the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi time and again promised to enhance the Minimum Support Price (MSP) by 50 per cent if his party comes into power, the government has simply backtracked on its promise. But soon after coming into power, the government raised the MSP for paddy and wheat by a paltry Rs 50 per quintal, which translates into an increase of 3.6 per cent, not enough to offset the additional burden of inflation at that time.

The farmers’ anger is quite justified. Despite being at the bottom of the pyramid, Indian farmers have not failed the nation. While they continue to produce a bumper harvest year after year, they are made to pay the price for keeping food prices low for consumers. A per the latest estimates of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) a famer family on an average earns only Rs 3,078 from farming operations. According to another survey, nearly 58 per cent of the farmers go to bed hungry. Another survey by Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) shows that 62 per cent farmers want to quit agriculture. 

On top of it, basmati rice and cotton witnessed a crash in its prices. While basmati rice production had doubled in Punjab and Haryana, an alarming dip in prices was observed. Disappointed farmers sold basmati at prices ranging between Rs 1600-2400 per quintal, against a price of Rs 3,261 to Rs 6,085 they got last year. In cotton too, prices slumped from an average of Rs 4,400 to Rs 5,200 per quintal last year to around Rs 3,000 this year, prompting the government to direct the Cotton Corporation of India to step in to buy at the procurement price of Rs 3,750 per quintal.

In Maharashtra alone, the downtrend in cotton and soybean prices had resulted in a loss of Rs 12,000-crores for farmers.

In case of sugarcane the situation is no better. In fact, reports of cane farmers committing suicide due to delayed payments have poured in recently from Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka. Despite the sugar sector decontrol coming into effect, the fact remains that the mills have still to clear cane price arrears of Rs 12,300-crore.

Appearing before a Supreme Court bench of Justices S J Mukhopadhaya and N V Ramana, the additional solicitor general Maninder Singh however said: Prescribing an increase of at least 50 per cent on cost may distort the market. A mechanical linkage between MSP and cost of production may be counter-productive in some cases.” He told the court that the pricing policy seeks to achieve the objective of fair and remunerative prices and is not an income policy. While the Court is still to deliver its verdict, in simple words, the government has expressed its inability to hike the MSP.

At a time when the industry has managed to even wrest out of cost accounting procedures in many important sectors like coal, natural gas and automobile, and therefore can arbitrarily fix any price for their products, I find it amusing to know that providing a higher price to farmers will distort the markets. Considering that only 6 per cent India’s 60-crore farmers get the benefit of MSP, and the remaining 94 per cent is in any case dependent on the vagaries of markets, which shows the markets are only exploiting the farmers. If the markets had provided farmers with an economic price, I am sure 94 per cent of the farming community would have been a happy lot by now.

The question of an ‘income policy’ for farmers therefore assumes importance in the wake of the serial death dance that continues to be enacted on the farms. Over 3 lakh farmers have committed suicide in the past 17 years.  Moreover, with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) breathing down the neck, and demanding freezing of MSP for farmers, it looks difficult whether the government will have the political courage to defy WTO. Given these circumstances, the best option is to start looking for a guaranteed monthly income for farmers, which benefits the entire farming community unlike the pricing policy through a system of providing MSP for wheat and rice farmers.

The real big bang in economic reforms would therefore be when the government constitutes a National Farmers Income Commission that works out a minimum assured monthly income that a farming family must get. Incorporating crop harvest and also basing the calculations on the geographical location of the farm, the Commission should be directed to provide a real time estimate of the farm income for various categories of farmers. If a chaprasi in the government can get a minimum basic salary of Rs 15,000 per month, I see no reason why the farmers should be deprived of his legitimate due. #

Farmers urgently need help. April 9, 2015. DNA Mumbai.
http://epaper.dnaindia.com/story.aspx?id=77681&boxid=20514&ed_date=2015-04-09&ed_page=12&ed_code=820009   

खाली हैं अन्न उपजाने वाले हाथ April 9, 2015, Amar Ujala. 
http://www.amarujala.com/news/samachar/reflections/columns/poor-situation-of-farmers-hindi/?hc_location=ufi

Land Acquisition: Let's have a land audit first.

In the days to come the battle over Land takeover is only going to be intensified, both in Parliament as well as on the streets. As various farmer organizations get ready to storm Jantar Mantar on Mar 18, and Anna Hazare planning a padyatra from Mar 30, the government itself is getting ready to face the tough challenge in Rajya Sabha where it lacks the numbers.

While the Lok Sabha passed the LandAcquisition bill with 11 minor amendments, most of these already existing in the 2013 law, the painstaking defense by Rural Development Minister Birender Singh has failed to cut much ice. In the shrieking debates and the deafening noise that preceded and still continues, the real issues behind the need for a law that allows forceful takeover of land have disappeared from public scrutiny. In this article I am trying to analyse some of the main arguments that have been floated to justify land acquisition without the consent of the farmer.

I hear again and again that the availability of land is coming in the way of development. Projects worth Rs 4-lakh crore are held up because of non-availability of land. While the government has failed to provide a list of projects that have been held up, Economic Survey 2015 does not list land as a limiting factor for infrastructure projects to take off. It states that the projects are held up because of unfavourable market conditions, and lack of investor interest. Secondly, if land availability was a factor I don’t see any reason why over 576 Special Economic Zones should have failed to perform.

A CAG report says that out of the 45,635.63 hectares of land notified for the development of SEZs, actual operations took place in only 28,488.49 hectares or 62 per cent of the land acquired. Neither did the SEZs create employment nor did it lead to manufacturing or industrial growth. And remember there was no environment clearance hurdle nor was there any social impact assessment required. Moreover, with all kinds of tax holidays, estimated to be in tune of Rs 1.75 lakh crore, the SEZs failed to perform. In a scathing comment, CAG says “Acquisition of land from the public by the government is proving to be a major transfer of wealth from the rural populace to the corporate world.”

I don’t think the government even knows how much of land already acquired is lying vacant. An investigation by a TV channel found that nearly 45 per cent land acquired in just five States is lying unused. In Orissa, for example, 3799 acres acquired for TISCO steel plant in Gopalpur in 1995 has still not been used. 

In any case, the government is eyeing 17 lakh acres of surplus land lying with public sector undertakings. With so much of land already available, I don’t see any reason why the available surplus land is not first put to proper use.

Further, the argument that the 2013 law needed to be changed since the Chief Ministers wrote against it is simply amusing. Let us not forget that the Chief Ministers of the coal mining States also opposed open auction of the coal blocks. But after a Supreme Court order cancelled 204 coal blocks, the auctions that are underway are likely to bring in revenue of Rs 15-lakh- crore. I wonder why in a market economy, where free enterprise is being promoted, the private sector can’t be asked to bid for land in open auctions taking the prevailing market price as the base price.

A study by IIT Roorkee estimates that in past 50 years some 50 million people have been displaced by ‘development projects’. With the oustees of Bhakra dam and Pong dam still not rehabilitated, land conflicts have erupted primarily because the government forcibly takes over land for the private entities in the name of ‘public purpose’. As several CAG reports have found out that the land acquired has finally gone into the hands of real estate firms who have made fortunes.

In 2013-14, a study by Washington-based Rights and Resources initiative found 252 conflicts over land acquisition. A Newsweek article sometimes back had pointed to 75,000 land conflicts, most of them bloody, in China every year. A recent report states that 28 lakh villagers have committed suicide in China in past 10 years. About 80 per cent of them did so because of forcible land takeover. Lawmakers in India therefore need to be doubly concerned about the resulting socio-economic unrest.

Actually, the commodification of land is part of a global design. Globally, an area equivalent to the cultivable area of China and India has already been acquired by private capital. For India, it was in 1996 that the World Bank had asked to move 40-crore people – twice the combined population of UK, France and Germany – from the rural to the urban areas in next 20 years, by 2015. In 2008, the World Development Report of the World Bank had asked India to hasten the demographic shift by going in for land rentals. It is primarily for this reason that agriculture is deliberately being starved of resources, and farmers’ income is being kept low to force them to abandon farming and migrate.

Pitting agriculture against industrial development is a faulty debate. At a time when jobless growth is the norm anywhere and everywhere, industry cannot absorb even a fraction of the growing workforce. In past 10 years, between 2004 and 2014, only 1.5 crore jobs were created despite a high growth rate. Encouraging entrepreneurship in the rural areas and providing land to the landless is therefore the only sensible way to revitalize the economy. If the drought-prone village of Hibre Bazaar in Maharashtra can now boast of 60 lakhpatis, I see no reason why it can’t be the norm in the rest of the country. #