Rural India has to be the pivot of Skill India. Start with farmers

In the midst of all the excitement generated over the launch of an ambitious ‘Skill India’ initiative, I find two news reports to be particularly disturbing. These reports are a reflection of the worsening job scenario, with or without specially acquired ‘skills’.  

In Madhya Pradesh, 362,685 people applied for the jobs of peon/guards in 58 State Government departments. Of these 14,000 were either post-graduates or engineers. They all sat for a written examination. I wonder what kind of special skills are required to be a peon/guard that they need to go through a written test. Anyway, another news report tells us how a Mumbai-based post graduate, with four degrees in hand, including an MA in globalization and labour from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, is working with the Mumbai Municipal Corporation cleaning the city’s garbage. An MBA was among those who had recently applied for 26 jobs of peons in the Punjab and Haryana High Court in Chandigarh.

While the ‘Skill India’ initiative to provide particular skills to 400 million people by 2020 is certainly welcome, I don’t know whether we already have an over-skilled work force or we have a long way to catch up with some of the developed countries record in providing skills. For instance, if India were to just categorise its 52 per cent farming population as skilled workforce, it will immediately move into the developed country category with over 50 per cent skilled manpower. Farming being a skilled profession, farmers have been deliberately treated as non-skilled workers. Categorising farmers as skilled workforce has financial implications, including ensuring minimum wages, paying health expenses and also providing post retirement benefits. That’s why farmers are kept out.

Similarly, I find one of the biggest employment generating sectors – temples/churches/gurdwaras – to be outside the purview of skilled workforce. Those who join these religious institutions are also skilled, even if they don’t require an ITI diploma.

The definition of what constitutes a ‘skill’ therefore has to change. I see no reason why farmering, which employs 52 per cent of the population, should not be included as part of the skilled workforce. At the same time there is a dire need to launch a skill improvement programme for young farmers with adequate financial and institutional support to enable them to become start-ups and entrepreneurs. There is a much greater possibility to turn the young workforce in rural areas to learn avocations that can make them self-employed. This is specially required considering that nearly 81 per cent of the land holdings are below 2 acres, which means the young members of the small and marginal farm families need to be trained to supplement their income from non-farm activities.

Besides shifting the thrust of public investments to rural areas, what is also required is to provide proper incentives for bringing about a required change. A poor woman in a village who wants to rear a goat for creating a viable livelihood option too needs to be given incentives that are given to big industrial houses. She needs to borrow Rs 8,000 for buying a goat which comes from a Micro-Finance Institute (MFI) charging 24 per cent rate of interest. On the other hand, big industrial houses are often given credit at 0.1 per cent interest. If only the poor woman was to get the loan for buying a goat at 0.1 per cent I am sure she would be driving a Nanocar at the end of two years. Similarly, Farmer Producer Companies, which enables farmers to get into entrepreneurship, have to pay an interest of 30 per cent on the profits generated. Why can’t it be brought down to 15 per cent to begin with? 

Therefore, there is a dire need to change the focus of skill development programme. It cannot be only aimed at meeting the requirement of 30-crore cheap labour -- dhari mazdoors -- that the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) estimates the construction sector will require by 2022. Only a fraction of the jobs in the construction sector would need the kind of skills that the ITIs are known to train them for. More than 95% jobs in the construction industry are simply of daily wager workers.  Also, an ICRIER study shows that automation and increase in labour productivity destroyed 11.8 million jobs in the manufacturing sector in post reforms period. That’s a warning that cannot be ignored. #

*Rural India has to be the pivot of Skill India: Start with farmers. ABPLive.in July 19, 2015
http://www.abplive.in/author/devindersharma/2015/07/19/article655531.ece/Rural-India-has-to-be-the-pivot-of-Skill-India-Start-with-farmers?fb_ref=Default

Pushing farmers out of agriculture is not economic growth.

A few days after the release of the latest census data I happened to be participating in a TV discussion on the continuing distress in agriculture. After all, with nearly 2,500 farmers quitting agriculture every day, and with the number of cultivators owning land declining to less than the number of landless farm labourers for the first time, the question that was asked to me was whether this was good news or bad.

“It certainly is bad news for the country,” I replied, adding: “But it must have come as a great disappointment to India’s planners and policy makers. They were anticipating a bigger shift in population from the rural to urban areas, and it shows that all their efforts to force the farmers to abandon agriculture have not worked so well. They have not been able to meet the economic prescription that the World Bank had prescribed.” Needless to say, the economist on the panel wouldn’t agree.

At a conference organised by M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, in Chennai, way back in 1996, I vividly recall a presentation made by the then Chairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and also a vice chairman of the World Bank, Dr Ismail Serageldin. He said as per World Bank’s estimates the number of people migrating from the rural to urban areas in India in another 20 years – by 2015 – would be equal to twice the combined population of UK, France and Germany. The combined population of these three European countries is around 200 million. So the World Bank had anticipated 400 million people, more than the population of United States, moving out of rural areas in India in the next 20 years.

I thought this was a warning. Perhaps the World Bank was telling us to be doubly careful and initiate appropriate policy approaches to restrict the population shift, which is laced with disastrous socio-economic as well as political ramifications.  No, I wasn’t correct. The World Bank was actually spelling out an economic prescription. This becomes apparent when you read the subsequent World Development Reports, annual publications of the World Bank. Reading the 2008 World Development Report, I was shocked to find the bank actually asking India to speed up the population transfer by encouraging land rental markets. 

At the same time, the bank made it abundantly clear that the younger people in rural areas do not know anything but farming. Displacing them from agriculture without teaching them the skills to become industrial workers will only add to the rural workforce. It therefore suggested setting up a network of training centres where these youngsters could be trained to become industrial workers. And no wonder, in the 2009 Budget speech, just before the elections, the then Finance Minister made a budgetary provision for setting up 1,000 industrial training institutes.

I wasn’t therefore surprised when Dr Raghuram Rajan, the new governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), parroted the same economic prescription. In an interview with the New York Times, this is what Rajan had to say:  “In terms of where will growth come from, it doesn’t need to come from fancy stuff like extraordinary innovation of one kind or another. Just getting people from agriculture into services and industry itself is growth.” He has repeated the same solution to the economic woes in a Walk the Talk he had with Shekhar Gupta sometimes ago. And as I said earlier, Rajan too is disappointed. In another interview, he admitted that the exit of people from agriculture has not kept pace with economic growth.

Soon after assuming office, when Rajan said he is not looking for the number of ‘likes’ on the facebook but is contemplating some tough decisions, my impression was actually he wanted to convey was that he will opt for ‘tough love’ – tough for the aam aadmi, and love for the rich -- because this is exactly what the market economy textbooks prescribe. Allow for unbridled privatisation of profits, and when the bubble bursts socialise the costs. It’s the poor who must make sacrifices to keep the wheels of economy churning. This is exactly what happened at the time of the 2008-09 economic melt-down. This is what subsequently led to the Eurozone crisis, and this is what has been at the back of India’s economic downturn.  

Moving people out of agriculture may be the ultimate goal, but there are some ways to prop up the economy in a short-term. Sometimes back, senior journalist and author M J Akbar had in one of his columns given us an excellent idea. He quoted a Russian Finance Minister, who in wake of declining GDP in Russia, actually asked fellow Russians that the least they can do to help the economy grow is to start drinking more vodka. The Economist too has among other things suggested opening up of casinos to ensure that people with surplus money do not flock to Sri Lanka on weekends. As if this is not enough, the Thai have proposed setting up of massage parlours under the Indo-Thai free trade agreement that is being renegotiated. Massage parlours are of course a service industry.

If these are the options available to raise the sagging economy, there is something terribly wrong with the way we perceive economic growth.  But let us first look at the flawed thinking that is aimed at destroying domestic agriculture. The neglect of agriculture is deliberate and part of a bigger design. In a country where roughly 70 per cent of the population lives in the countryside, there can be nothing more disastrous than to plan for a massive population shift in the coming decades. Just because the World Bank/IMF and the American universities have been flouting the crazy hypothesis, does not mean that we should follow it blindly. What India needs therefore are leaders with vision and wisdom and not ideological free market brats who cannot see beyond the G-20 mandate. 

Agriculture provides livelihoods for nearly 600 million people. They are certainly underemployed, and undernourished. The challenge therefore is to make them gainfully employed, and not to uproot them and turn them into agricultural refugees. Like the young graduate from a business school, a farmer is also an entrepreneur. He needs improved skills for which he needs training, and also needs a launching pad. Take the case of a poorest of poor women in a village. When she goes out to buy a goat, she needs microfinance. She eventually ends up paying 24 per cent interest to MFIs, which at weekly repayment plan turns to be 38 per cent. With such a predatory interest, she will perpetually remain in the poverty trap.

If steel tycoon Laxmi Mittal can be advanced Rs 1,250-crore at zero interest for investment in Bathinda refinery, or if Ratan Tata can be provided land at a throwaway price and financial credit at 0.5 per cent rate of interest, I wonder why the poor are penalised. Provide the poor women credit at zero percent, and I bet she would be driving a Nano car at the end of the year. Give the farmer a decent monthly assured income, and make appropriate investments in rural infrastructure, and I can tell you he will not only put the country’s economic growth on a much higher pedestal, but ensure that the gains of economic development are distributed widely and equitably.

India therefore provides a unique opportunity for neoliberal breed of economists like Raghuram Rajan to de-learn and un-graduate. As someone said, that’s the only way we will learn to challenge all that we have accepted as time-tested truths. Move away from the growth fetish, remove the IMF/World Bank cap, and start looking afresh at economics as if people mattered. If a non-descript village like Hiware Bazaar in Maharashtra can boast of 60 millionaires, and that too without any forcible land acquisitions under public-private partnership or sucking the state exchequer dry with tax sops and tax holidays, each of the nearly 6.4 lakh villages that dot the country can do the same.

What India needs is a production system by the masses, and not for the masses. That’s what Mahatma Gandhi said. And he wasn’t wrong. #   

Source: Tehelka, Vol 10 Issue 38, Sept 21, 2013.

 http://www.tehelka.com/forsaking-agriculture-is-not-the-right-answer/