NEW DELHI: Left on the margins with no clear role within the BJP, Lok Sabha MP Varun Gandhi has turned an author with his maiden book "A Rural Manifesto", which takes a critical view of the unabated agrarian distress in the country. The book has come at a time when the BJP is seemingly pushed to the wall in the BJP-ruled states — Chhattisgarh, Madhya Prdaesh, and Rajasthan — on account of the perceived agrarian distress.
The book argues that efforts to make Indian agriculture globally competitive have come to nought. Gandhi has done an exhaustive research to analyse issues faced by the rural landscape, with unabated migration along with dwindling agricultural income even as indebtedness of the farmers continues to mount.
With farmers' loan waiver in vogue in election times as the Congress and BJP have shown to succumb to the pulls of populism in times of elections, Gandhi's maiden book argues for extension of basic income to the small and marginal farmers, which they could utilise to improve their lots.
Gandhi appears to have taken contrarian views on some of the policies and schemes which are being aggressively pushed by the Narendra Modi government at the Centre. For instance, Gandhi, while praising the Ujjawala scheme under which people below the poverty line gets free cooking LPG connection, reasons that the government should rather go for electrical stoves since the LPG network in the rural areas remains challenged and the price pressure could sometimes make the beneficiaries shift to woods.
"Assuming a BPL family of five, with all having daily income of Rs 33, and approximate effective cost of refilling cylinder at Rs 500 (Odisha), it could spend almost 10 per cent of their monthly income on energy for cooking, leading them to ration LPG use and continue using unhealthy alternate energy sources," argues Gandhi in the book.
Seemingly seeking a rural template to re-invent his political career in a departure from the fire-brand mould he had been seen in the run-up to the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Gandhi, who had been interacting with youths during his regular visits to universities and colleges, reportedly worked for about two years to examine issues at the core of the rural distress before writing the book.
His contrarian views against the police stance of the Modi government are further illustrated in the book where he advocates Mahatma Gandhi's "Gram Swaraj (self-sufficient villages" model of economy, besides arguing against big dams, which are drying rivers, and banking more on traditional irrigation methods. Much against Modi's dig at Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in his inaugural address in the Lok Sabha in 2014, Gandhi has praised the rural flagship scheme, saying it, indeed, increased the incomes in the rural areas.
Gandhi comes out with a bold remedy for scam ridden irrigation departments by advocating allowing formation of a holding company, offering a transparent management information system that evaluations the performance of each irrigation system in a state. "The irrigation departments, meanwhile, can be broken up into independent companies for each irrigation system, based by basin, which are offered operational autonomy, free from political interference, with the ability to charge cost plus prices, and a performance-based incentive system. Such systems can be mutated into public private partnerships, which can help alleviate water scavenging," the book says.
He has also illustrated the history of scam-hit irrigation works in the country.