The farmers in Maharashtra are protesting
against the BJP government. News reports suggest that there are approximately
30,000 of them on streets in Suburban Mumbai, ready to enter the city by Sunday
evening. They are demanding a complete loan waiver, better minimum support
price as recommended by the Swaminthan Committee report, no “forceful” acquisition
of farm land in name of development and in a few cases transfer of forest land
that the farmers have been tilling for many decades now. The news reports can
be read here,
here
and here.
In case you want to read a melodramatic, fiction style version of the protest,
you can read it on The
Wire. Though the protests started much earlier, the media gave it attention
only after the protesters landed at the gates of Mumbai.
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| We gave you a sickle and a hammer for 21st century farming. What else do you need? |
Now that we know what the farmers want, we
should also know who is organising the protest march. The farming community in India
is too fragmented and diversified to have same concerns and hence is not
unified. The present movement is being organised under the umbrella of the
Akhil Bhartiya Kisan Sabhi (ABKS), the peasant front of the Communist Party of India
(Marxist). The same CPI(M), which was handed a resounding defeat in Tripura
last week. The protesting farmers can be seen with the CPI(M) flags and caps,
marching ahead towards Mumbai. The CPI(M) and its extended arms in trade unions
have all the right to protest, take out processions and give speeches. We
thankfully, live in a democracy and not some Communist dictatorship.
If there are genuine concerns about the
agrarian situation in India and a union is using democratic means to highlight
the concerns, then no one should have the problem. But then there are problems.
What the protesters are demanding is nothing new. A blanket waiver of farm
loans has been demanded and handed over in the past. The UPA government in
2008, did that. It awarded a loan waiver of ₹60,000
crore to small and marginal farmers. But guess what, within a few years the
farmers were demanding yet another loan waiver and the governments started handing
them out. The loan waiver had clearly not helped the farmers much.
The problem of farmers is not loans or their
waiver by the government. Their problem can be summed up in just one word, “inefficiency”.
And no one is willing to talk about it. Neither the union or state governments
nor the self-appointed saviour of farmers, the CPI(M). The inefficiency that is
pulling the farmers and the country down can be measured by comparing the
agricultural sectors of India and China. Despite having less arable land, China
produced far more per unit of land than
India does. Irrigation, transportation, storage, pricing, etc. are all
making farming an unviable occupation. If the system is kept inefficient the
farmers will keep protesting and the governments will keep waiving the loans
off.
The agrarian distress has become a political
tool to create hysteria. The CPI(M) and others of their strip use it to
highlight how Capitalism is killing the farmers and hence generate support
among the poor and the so called intellectuals. The others use it to either
pull the opposition down or to appear magnanimous by announcing ruinous loan
waivers. Not a single political party has ever come up with a comprehensive
plan to improve the farm sector in India. And surprisingly the things that can
fix the problems do not require out of this world innovation.
Here are a few things that can bring efficiency
in the farming sector and relieve the farmers from their economic stress.
Irrigation is the most crucial aspect of
farming. Farmers spend money on sinking tube wells and then on pumping water
out of it. A vast majority of the farmers depend on ground water and monsoon
for irrigation. Both are unreliable. The water table on one hand is depleting
at alarming levels and the Monsoon is not getting stronger. The alternate is
finding frugal solutions. For millennia, the Indians have been using water
harvesting to meet their domestic and agricultural needs. Revive
the ponds, lakes, tanks, reservoirs that were used to store rain water and to
recharge the ground water.
Cooperatives – India has witnessed success
stories in cooperative movement. Amul being a highly successful model. Since
the vast majority of farmers are marginal farmers with small land holdings,
their produce can easily be pooled into a cooperative and they can be paid the
right price without having to travel to the mandis with their meagre crop and
non-existent bargaining power.
Middlemen – Remove them. Too many fruit and
vegetable markets in India are controlled by middlemen who decide on prices and
what to be bought. The eye watering prices of onions are not a result of a poor
crop, but that of hoarding by the middlemen. The farmers should be given direct
access to the markets where they can openly sell their products, to whoever
they want to.
Logistics – The concept of farm logistics is
non-existent in India. The Food Corporation of India does a shoddy job at
storing and distributing its stock of food grains. It is time that it is
privatised with a clear tariff structure. Thousands of tonnes of grains is
wasted every year thanks to the lack of infrastructure.
Minimum Support Price (MP) – Phase it out. There is no point
incentivising farmers to produce a certain type of crop. The market forces are
strong enough to create the demand. Many farmers grow certain crops in hope of getting
the MSP. The government ends up with a huge stock, which eventually gets
wasted. On top of that not all farmers get to sell their crops to the
government. Once the MSP is phased out, the farmers will grow what they think
will fetch them the right price.
Information – This point is linked to the
cooperative framework, where farmers will be given information on what the
different crops can fetch them. For example, growing celery or lettuce might be
a better proposition, in some geographies, than growing tomatoes.
Value addition – The farming communities can be
trained to add value to their products by processing them. Tomatoes can be
sundried, squashed, pulped or turned into ketchup. Processing fruits and
vegetable not only increases their shelf life but also fetches more money per
unit. And one doesn’t really need capital intensive manufacturing plants for
such jobs.
Land acquisition – This is probably the toughest
part to handle. Various governments have tried many different approaches to
handle this monster of a task. Nothing seems to have pleased everyone. Nothing
probably will. The most common grievance of farmers, whose land gets acquired,
is that what do they do with the money when their livelihood is being taken
away. This is true. The unskilled farmers do not have an option to seek
employment in the organised sector. The compensation, no matter how large,
eventually runs out and they end up working on other peoples’ farms. A way to
ensure regular income to the farmers can be to put part of their compensation
into an annuity scheme. This will ensure a regular monthly income and leave
them with some cash to use.
Skill them – We have to be honest with
ourselves. Farming is no longer a sector people want to be in. It is far too
labour intensive in India and gives pathetic returns. The time has come when
children of farmers should be given the option of training in other trades
where they can seek employment if they so wish to.
There are many other ways that can drastically
change the way Indian farmers live and earn their livelihood. Sadly no one is
willing to push for those changes. The CPI(M) is happy mobilising 30,000
farmers to Mumbai for a loan waiver but will never ever seek technological
changes for the farmers. For if the farmers cease to be poor their politics of
poverty will become irrelevant. The others are not interested in improving the
lives of the farmers because they are too fragmented on caste lines to be
counted as a voting block.
Unless the government has a vision to improve
the lives of farmers by using technology and market access, the farmers will be
used by both the CPI(M) and the others as political tools. Their lives will not
improve, food wastage will continue and they will keep protesting.
