Farmers are well known for producing food crops. But have you ever wondered what are the Indian food policy and agriculture planners known for ? What have they contributed to the wellbeing of farmers apart from words and faulty data ?
Farmer Incomes Commission
Forty years after the dawn of ‘Green Revolution’, Indian agriculture is once again at the
crossroads. With agriculture becoming unremunerative over the years, and with input-output
ratios faltering, the growth in agriculture has decelerated. When forests are destroyed or
soil fertility is diminished or water table plummets to dangerously low levels, the rural
poor often have no option but to migrate to towns and cities in search of jobs. Such
inequitable development is leading to social disintegration.
For a country, which emerged from the throes of a ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence, to be
subsequently able to build up foodgrain reserves, sustainable agriculture was the
unmistaken path to equitable growth, development, and national food security. The
green revolution technology, which ushered in ‘food self-sufficiency’, however came with
enormous environmental costs. Monoculture, mechanical ploughing, soil erosion, the
extension of crops into forests and the use and abuse of chemicals has contributed
to the second-generation environmental impacts that the intensively farmed lands of
the country are grappling with.
Green revolution has not only gone sour, it has collapsed. The unexplained number of
massive farmer suicides is a testimony to the entire equation going wrong. However, the
fundamental issue of destruction of sustainable livelihoods is not at all being addressed.
Villages after villages around the country are turning into a cesspool of deprivation and
mounting indebtedness arising from the blind adoption of intensive farming systems that
the government promoted. You don’t come across villages, which are not faced with real
crisis in sustainability -- yields declining drastically, soil gasping for breath, and
farmers being pushed out of agriculture.
No wonder, villages are being put on sale in many parts of the country.
It isn’t the spate of farmer’s suicides, on an upswing and still counting that makes the
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to admit the magnitude of agrarian crisis that prevails.
The unforeseen slump in agriculture growth rate – slipping between 1 to 2 per cent – in
turn affected the industrial growth rate, which restricted quantum jumps in the national
economy is what makes for the PM’s concern.
In what appears to be a desperate move to prop up agriculture growth, the Prime Minister
has time and again called for " reversing the declining trend in investment in agriculture ";
and among the measures mentioned stepping up credit flow to farmers; strengthening future
trading and contract farming and talked of creating a ‘single market’ for agricultural
produce and to provide the latest technology to farmers.
Strikingly similar to the faulty Vision 2020 that the former Chief Minister of Andhra
Pradesh, Mr Chandrababu Naidu, had unsuccessfully applied, and was therefore routed out
in the last state elections, Prime Minister’s approach is also aimed at compounding the
already existing crisis in farming.
There is therefore an urgent need to draw a national framework under which
location-specific alterations and adaptations need to be tried. What is needed is a
fresh approach that takes the ground realities into consideration before embarking
upon any policy imperatives. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister is fostering on the
nation a faulty farm strategy, which has already failed in the United States and Europe,
resulting in the eviction of farmers over the years. In the US, only 7 lakh farmers now
remain on the farm. In Europe, every minute one farmer quits agriculture.
The strategy for reviving agriculture in India therefore has to be different.
Citing the reasons of “price rise” and “globalisation and liberalisation”, the UPA
government has spelled out terms of references for the sixth pay commission. Nearly
4.2 million central government employees, and 20 million state government employees,
will receive a salary bonanza that will cost the state exchequer more than Rs
1,00,000-crore a year.
On the other hand, for the 110 million farming families all
that is being promised is more credit -- doubling farm credit in the next three years.
What remains unexplained is why a farmer is expected to live on credit while the rest
of the society is blessed with a fixed monthly income?
No wonder, the suicide death dance continues. More than 1200 farmers in Vidharba region
of Maharashtra have committed suicide (till Nov 30th) after the Prime Minister’s
Rs 3,750-crore relief package was announced on July 1. In other parts of the country,
the rural landscape remains equally depressing -- mounting rural indebtedness,
unmanageable glut at the time of harvest, swelling rural to urban migration.
With
agriculture turning into a highly losing proposition, more than 40 per cent of the
farming population has expressed the desire to quit and migrate to the urban centres.
Let us take a look at the latest report of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO).
The average income of a farm household in 2003 stood at a paltry Rs 2,115. Compare it with
the monthly salary of a peon in government service, an average monthly packet is at least
five times more than what a farmer gets. While government employees look forward to a
fixed monthly income packet every month and gets the benefit of an annual increment as
an adjustment for general price rise, the farmer is left high and dry and at the mercy
of the moneylender or the banker.
To make it still worse, farm income all over the world has remained static between 1980
and 2003. Adjusting for inflation, a recent UNCTAD report states that the prices of all
major commodities showed a declining trend. The report stated that between 1997 and 2001,
the combined price index for all commodities fell by 53 per cent in real terms,
thereby “commodities lost more than half their purchasing power in terms of manufactured
goods.” In India, the impact has been much more severe. Recurring farmer suicides is a
reflection of that.
For nearly 60 per cent of the population, as much as 85 per cent of their earnings come
from crop cultivation and wages earned by family members from employment generation
programmes. In fact, what is more startling is that over the years the farm earnings
of marginal farmers have dropped to less than that of the daily wage labourers in many
parts of the country.
Uttar Pradesh farmers have the lowest income – Rs 1630 per month. Farmers in Madhya
Pradesh, Rajasthan and Orissa were only a trifle better. The highest farm income was
recorded in Jammu & Kashmir - – Rs 5,500 a month, followed closely by Punjab and Kerala.
Subsequent studies by the Ministry of Agriculture point to declining farm incomes in the
past five years. The sharp decline in farm incomes is happening at a time when urban areas
are witnessing an upswing.
Farm income over the years has eroded. Let us accept that like everyone else, farmer too
needs an adequate monthly take-home package that takes care of his family needs and
leaves him with a little surplus to sow the next crop. While the government clerk and
for that matter the government employees continue to get the benefit of unwarranted
pay hikes, annual increments, medical allowances, paid holidays and of course financial
loans at the drop of a hat, the farmer remains out of bound for all these bounties.
Surviving against all odds, and despite the low earnings, farmers have worked hard to
ensure national food self-sufficiency.
A healthy and vibrant farm sector is to the
benefit of the national economy. Probably the only way to ensure the economic viability
of the farm sector is to either enlarge the scope of the 6th pay commission to include
farmers or to set up a separate pay commission for the farmers. Based on the minimum
land-holdings, and de-coupled from production, there is an immediate need to ensure
that farmers get an assured income.
Like the minimum support price, which was applicable in reality to a few crops, the
National Farmers Commission should be entrusted the task to work out a minimum farm
income for the farmers. Irrespective of productivity, and depending upon the
agro-climatic conditions in which a farm is situated, a formula that entails
a ‘minimum take-home’ income for a farmer has to be worked out. Based on that, the
government ensure that each farmer gets a monthly remunerative income.
For a country, which has been listed by the World Bank as the 12th richest nation in the
world, with its GDP touching Rs 35,34,915-crore in 2005, this is the least that needs to
attempted to provide the ailing farm sector a reprieve. For a country, which boasts of $
160 billion of foreign reserves, wiping out every tear on the farm should be the top
priority. There is no other way to pull agriculture from the prevailing crisis.