BATHINDA/VIDARBHA/NEW DELHI : For the past several weeks, Veer Pal Kaur’s day begins at 5 am. She cooks for her family, finishes chores before hopping on to an auto rickshaw with a poster strung on one side that reads: “Vote for the families of farm widows and for a new Punjab.”“My father, father-in-law and husband committed suicide owing to loans they couldn’t repay. I ran from pillar to post for compensation but got none,” Kaur said before leaving home, a one-room unplastered house at Ralla village in Punjab’s Mansa district. With no governmental aid forthcoming, she decided to contest the Lok Sabha election from Bathinda constituency to fight the “injustice” towards families of suicide victims.
As the autorickshaw belched out statistics of farmers caught in a debt trap, she railed against mainstream political parties for only paying lip service to the plight of farmers. Veer’s case is not an isolated statistic. According to J P Mishra, former Advisor (Agriculture) Niti Aayog, in the absence of institutional credit networks, “farmers are at the mercy of money lenders who function as leeches sucking out blood.”
“The challenge in agriculture is problem of plenty – more production, less price. Price, pricing, procurement and logistics are areas of focus for the government to steer agriculture out of distress,” adds Mishra.
Agriculture being a state subject has been a convenient alibi for ruling dispensations to pass the buck. With a vast majority of farmers caught in a vicious debt trap, political outfits milk them with doles without actually changing their conditions. As India inches towards result day (May 23), debt-ridden farmers are on the brink of taking their own lives. The new government will have to arrest the impending losses that are compounding the agrarian crisis in India.
As the nation awaits the formation of the next government of the world’s largest democracy, its citizens expect the Centre to address issues that plague the country. The Sunday Standard puts an ear to the ground and listens in to the expectations…