Those responsible for the agrarian crisis cannot be expected to provide a solution.

Fifty-three expert committees have submitted reports on farmer suicides in the past few decades and yet the serial death dance continues unabated. Despite so much of expert advice, nearly 3-lakh farmers have committed suicide in past 20 years, which averages to two farmers ending their lives somewhere in the country every hour. This paradoxical situation must an amazing feet that can find an entry into the Guinness Book of World Records.

I am not sure how many more committees will be set up to know why are farmer’s taking their own lives. But in the meanwhile what is becoming clearly evident is that even these experts are beginning to throw up their hands. A brain-storming session organized by Punjab Farmers Commission to find some newer approaches to address the continuing and deepening agrarian crisis failed to come up with any ‘out-of-the-box’ solution. Except for making some routine suggestions, they had nothing new to offer.

This reminds me of a news report a few weeks back which said Maharashtra’s Agriculture Minister Eknath Khadse had in an honest admission accepted that the State Government was clueless about how to put a stop to farmer suicides in Vidharbha and Marathwada regions. Such a feeling of despondency prevails at a time when Niti Ayog has set up a task force on agriculture and has also directed State Governments to constitute similar task forces.

I don’t know what the use of a task force on agriculture is when Niti Ayog vice-chairman, Dr Arvind Panagariya, has in his inaugural piece on the Niti Ayog website, already spelled out his approach to address the continuing agrarian crisis. He wants a sizeable percentage of the farming population to be forced out of agriculture. The roadmap, howsoever faulty it may be, has already been laid out and I wonder what purpose the task force at the Central and numerous others at the State level are therefore expected to achieve.

This is not the first time that an effort is being made to find solutions to the vexed farming crisis. Earlier too, and for several years now, numerous expert committees had been set up by the erstwhile Planning Commission.  At the same time, many State Governments, including Punjab, have brought out Agricultural Policy documents after a series of expert consultations. Also, in preparation for the 12^thPlan document, several task force and committees on sustainable agriculture, technology, water, and marketing had given their reports. The agrarian crisis meanwhile has continued to worsen.

I have time and again said that those responsible for the crisis cannot be expected to provide any plausible solutions. Most of the expert committees and panels are dominated by senior bureaucrats, farm scientists, economists and senior agriculture officers who have in one way or the other been part of the system that led to the crisis in the first place. To expect them to provide ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions therefore is like hoping against hope. If 53-expert committees have failed, it is futile to think that 30 more task forces to be set up across the country, both at the State and the Central level, would serve any purpose.

This is exactly what Albert Einstein had warned us about. He said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” 

He was so right. What is not being admitted is that the prevailing agrarian crisis is the outcome of the same kind of policies and approaches in which unfortunately we are now again trying to look for answers.  These unworkable solutions that are being routinely suggested fall within the contours of the existing agriculture cropping pattern. Some suggest diversification of crops like shifting from wheat to maize; some suggest water conservation as the key to boosting incomes; some other call for market-driven interventions; and finally everyone talks about need for raising crop productivity.

All these options have been tried in US/Europe and China. And still, US/Europe pays massive farm subsidies, exceeding $ 1 billion per day, to sustain farming operations. Withdrawing these subsidies would mean a collapse of the high-tech agriculture in the developed countries. Introducing more sophisticated and expensive machinery in India would simply add to farmer indebtedness. Further, despite a thrust on technology-based solutions like in Punjab, the farm crisis has only acerbated, 

Every day two farmers are committing suicide somewhere in Punjab, the frontline agricultural State.

For nearly three decades now, India’s rural underbelly has been gradually caving in. Excessive use of chemical fertilisers have turned the verdant lands poisonous, water mining has dried the aquifers leading to the expansion of the desert, and chemical fertilisers and pesticides have played havoc with the environment and human health. With the input prices climbing up year after year and the output prices remaining static, farmers have become a victim of the same economic policies that projected them as country’s heroes. Agriculture has turned not only unsustainable but economically unviable.

With all these technological inputs has the income of farmers gone up? I looked at the costs and price calculations for Punjab farmers who are considered to be progressive, using the latest technologies and also bestowed with 99 per cent assured irrigation. The latest reports of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) works out the average net returns from a hectare of wheat and rice Rs 36,052 or Rs 3,029 per month.

Increasing farm income without selling him a new technology or mechanical equipment requires a different approach in policy planning. It requires two immediate steps: 

1) Time to discard the usual set of experts to look at agriculture. We need people from divergent streams to think and plan differently. The same set of people who were at the helm of the crisis cannot be expected to provide any meaningful suggestions. This also holds true for the Niti Ayong task force. Looking at the composition of the task force, my only worry is that Niti Ayog’s recommendations might only worsen the existing crisis. Albert Einstein was not wrong. 

2) The solution to the complicated and vexed Indian farming crisis does not lie in America or China. It is high time we stop citing the examples from the developed countries, which only ends up importing newer and expensive farm machinery and equipment. The solutions lie in our own backyard. If we look carefully in our own backyard, and search for local solutions meeting the specific needs of an agro-ecological zone, we can have ever- lasting answers to ensuring sustainable food security in the long-term. Technological solutions play an important part, but the bottom line has to be on how to provide an assured monthly income package for farmers. #

समितियों का सिलसिला Dainik Jagran, June 6, 2015
http://www.jagran.com/editorial/apnibaat-continuation-of-committees-12449697.html

Package for Peasants. Orissa Post. June 10, 2015.
http://www.orissapost.com/epaper/100615/p8.htm

Indian farmers are living in hunger

At a time when change is the buzzword on the political landscape, when cities are changing, and the villages are no longer what they used to be; when incomes are rising for an educated few, and when the bottom of the pyramid – those below the poverty line -- are showered with a series of freebies; perhaps the only segment of the Indian society which hasn’t seen a change all these years is the 60-crore strong farming community.

With nearly 3 lakh farmers taking their own lives in the past 17 years, and with more than 65 per cent farmers’ heavily indebted, agriculture has the dubious distinction of supporting the largest percentage of population with the lowest incomes. The fact that the share of agriculture in country’s GDP is relentlessly sliding, presently hovering at a little over 13 per cent, means that such a large population is living on a thin edge. No wonder, with agriculture becoming highly uneconomical, more than 60 per cent farmers are dependent upon MNREGA wages to make the two ends meet. In other words, the people who grow food for the country are themselves going to bed hungry.

Such is the plight of Indian agriculture that in the past seven years – between 2007 and 2012 – 3.2 crore farmers have abandoned farming and moved into the cities looking for menial jobs. According to census 2011, every day 2,500 farmer quit agriculture. Some other studies have shown that roughly 50,000 people migrate from a village (and that includes farmers) into a town/city every day. As per a NSSO study, 42 per cent farmers want to quit if given an alternative.

Those who leave agriculture, sell off their meager land holdings and trudge to the cities looking for a better livelihood, end up plying rickshaw or working as a daily wage earner in the booming construction activity. Economists and policy makers call this as a sign of economic growth. Moving people out of agriculture is the ultimate growth, claims Raghuram Rajan, the Reserve Bank of India chief. Pushing them out of agriculture and forcing them to join the ranks of landless workers is the new economic mantra.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says that 70 per cent farmers are not required, and should be moved out of agriculture. World Bank wants India to move 40-crore people from the villages into the cities by the year 2015. I have never understood the economic logic behind such a massive translocation of the population from the rural into the urban areas. These are people who are somehow driving their livelihood from farming or other related activities in the villages. They may be under-employed but to force them out of the villages so as to provide temporary cheap labour for the growing construction and real estate industry is no solution to the continuing agrarian crisis.

Agriculture is the biggest employer in the country. By creating conditions that makes agriculture economically unviable we are only adding to the jobless growth. Take another Planning Commission study. It showed that at a time when the country’s GDP was hovering between 8-9 per cent between 2005 and 2009, more than 1.40 crore farmers had left agriculture. Normally it is believed that these farmers would be employed in the manufacturing sector. But manufacturing sector too showed a negative growth, cutting down on 57 lakh jobs. So where did these millions go?  

In such a depressing scenario, moving people out of agriculture does not make any economic and political sense. In fact, it serves a double whammy for the poor farmers. They sell-off their meager land holdings and move into the cities. But when the economic growth slows down even the daily wage jobs in cities dry up. They are therefore forced back into the villages and in the absence of any land to fall back upon they are left with no choice but to become completely dependent upon MNREGA jobs or serve as a farm worker. According to a CRISIL study, 1.5 crore farmers are expected to be returning back to the villages between 2012 and 2014 because there is no work available even in the cities.

The push to move a significant proportion of the population from the rural to the urban areas is reflected in the economic policies. To me there is nothing more worrying than the inability of the mainline economists to understand the social, economic and political implications of such a massive demographic change. By the year 2030, may studies estimate that roughly 50 per cent of the population would be staying in the cities. This certainly will bring in tremendous pressure on the government to create more employment opportunities in the cities, which unfortunately will not happen because the economic growth paradigm is based upon jobless growth.

If any meaningful change has to happen, it has to happen in agriculture. But if you are looking at a change in the form of encouragement for contract farming and corporate agriculture coupled with land acquisitions, it’s not going to address the terrible agrarian crisis. It needs a different prescription which is beyond the scope of the economic textbooks. It has to come in the form of providing gainful employment in the rural areas with focus on revitalizing sustainable farming. Hibre Bazar village in Maharashtra has shown that it is possible. From a perennially drought-prone village, Hibre Bazar now boasts of 60 millionaires in the same village.

It all begins by restoring the community control over the natural resources. Gram Sabhas have to be accorded supremacy in decision-making, and the emphasis has to shift to making agriculture sustainable in the long run and also making it economically viable. Providing farmers with a guaranteed monthly income will ensure economic stability. Once agriculture becomes profitable, farmers will resist the pressure as well as allurements to sell-off their farm lands. This can only be possible if the Reserve Bank of India formulates macro-economic policies that shift the focus to rebuilding the village economy. Unfortunately, it is presently following the IMF/World Bank prescription that calls for a massive rural-urban population shift.

Agriculture has to be ploughed back as the mainstay of Indian economy. It has the ability to provide gainful employment to two-third of the population, maintain environmental balance, and ensure food security for the nation. And as Dr M S Swaminathan has often said the future belongs to not those countries which have weapons, but those which have food. Let’s not fritter away the nation’s future by killing agriculture. That’s the change that India needs