Rural distress was uncomfortably worming its way into the plush drawing rooms of the urban elite. The farmers were on the march, disrupting traffic and the lives of city slickers. Images of saffron flags and demands of Ram Mandir a few days ago at Ayodhya were subsumed by more worldly issues and a sea of Red in New Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan.
In recent days, thousands of farmers had descended on the capital under the banner of the ‘Kisan Mukti Morcha’. They were demanding a special session of Parliament and the passage of two private member bills that authorise waiver of farm loans and a minimum purchase price for farm produce.
On October 2, eight weeks ago, another farmers’ march clashed with policemen on the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border. No one knows if these protests would stay peaceful. On June 6 last year, six protesting farmers were shot dead in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh, and a government commission has now exonerated the cops.
The images that were seen at the Kisan rally in the capital were disturbing. A group from Tamil Nadu was marching with skulls and bones, the remains of their colleagues who had taken their lives unable to bear the burden on farm loans. Some 50 widows from Telangana had travelled hundreds of miles with framed photographs of their husbands who took their lives after crops failed.
CRISIS OF PLENTY
The tragedy of India’s farm sector is not low production, but successful harvests; harvests for which the market mechanism has collapsed and for which farmers are getting paltry returns. It is a crisis of plenty. For instance, the 2017-18 foodgrain production was a record 285 million tonnes (MT), 3.65 per cent higher than previous year’s 275 MT. Production in 2015-16 was at 252 MT.
The record harvests did not bring prosperity to farmers’ homes. Prices crashed and the farmers were selling 30-50 per cent below the Minimum Support Price (MSP), and often below their cost of production. This meant an unending, downward spiral of indebtedness. In 2017, the best year in Indian agriculture, farm loans grew 20 per cent, and 58 per cent of our population or 600 million Indians dependent on farming struggled to make ends meet.
For those who marched the streets of Delhi this week, the promise by the Prime Minister of doubling farm income by 2022 must have sounded like a cruel joke.
Before the record harvests, since 2015, India has witnessed two major droughts, and some 600 incidents of crop losses due to unseasonal rains. The farmers have been left without any investible surplus.
The farm sector’s major driver has been livestock trade. After Brazil, India today is the second largest beef exporter, including buffalo carabeef, at 1.9 MT. The Dalwai Committee Report points out livestock were the biggest contributor to agricultural growth in the 2004-14 period. The US Department of Agriculture ranks India as having the largest cattle and buffalo herd in the world, with an estimated 305 million head. Livestock is seen as a good insurance against agrarian distress and a steady source of income. However, regressive policies over the last two-three years that have restricted normal cattle trade and attacks by cow vigilantes have crippled this sector and added to the crisis.
SWAMINATHAN PANEL
One of the demands of the marching farmers was the implementation of the National Commission of Farmers report, also known as the M S Swaminathan Commission. It came out with a series of reports in 2006. Despite nodding their heads in unison, neither the Congress nor the BJP governments have implemented it.
The Commission’s core proposal was to meet the crisis by giving farmers a minimum support price at 50 per cent above the cost of production, classified as C2 by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices. If implemented, it will provide immediate relief and give a minimum surplus to invest in the next crop.
The Commission had also proposed that farmers be made the owner of the land they have been tilling for years; and for distributing ceiling-surplus and waste land among farmers to correct the ownership skew – the bottom half of the rural households in total land ownership was only 3 per cent and the top 10 per cent was as high as 54 per cent.
Sounds easy, but it’s a tough call those in power must take before the flood waters of rural ‘Bharat’ turn uncontrollable.