No one is interested in farmer welfare

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.

We gave you a sickle and a hammer for 21st century farming.
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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.

Interpreting Ghare-Baire in 2017

Tagore’s Ghare-Baire was published in 1916, eleven years after the partition of Bengal and five years after its reunification. The story revolves around the nationalist movement, Swadeshi, in the backdrop of a partitioned Bengal. There are three main characters in the story, Sandip the revolutionary, Nikhil the rich but rationalist landlord and his newly emancipated wife, Bimala. Tagore has manifested his dislike for violent nationalism in the story. Sandip, a dear friend of Nikhil, is a strong proponent of Swadeshi and has a huge fan following. He wants to achieve his objectives at any cost. So much so that he would not shy away from acts like arson, sabotage and spreading communal venom. Nikhil on the other hand doesn’t believe in violence as a means to achieve Swadeshi. While the ideological clash is happening between Sandip and Nikhil, Bimala enters the plot and falls for Sandip and his ideology. The ambitions of Sandip pushes the estate into communal violence and in the end consumes Nikhil. Bimala, now a young widow has realised her folly, but it is too late.

Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation of the novel by the same name was released in 1984 and was a huge success. Ray was a lifelong Leftist and the story more or less served his ideology. Like most of Tagore’s work Ghare-Baire is still very relevant. It resonates with readers even though it is was written a hundred years ago. We still see Sandip around us carrying on with similar agenda, not afraid of using violence as a tool to achieve his goals. But India has changed a lot in the past hundred years. The India of 2017 is polarised between the Left and the Right, between the conservatives and the socialists/liberals.

Today we have TV debates on, who is a nationalist and who is not? Who defines nationalism? Can nationalism be forced upon us? And sure enough Tagore has been extensively quoted in the context. You can read it here and here. Sadly the people who quote Tagore to drill down the point that he was against nationalism, do not tell us that he was against violent nationalism, not the concept per se. His writings were influenced by the nationalist movements happening in Europe and the subsequent rise of Fascism. European countries were carrying out war in name of saving the nation and Tagore must have felt that the violent streak of nationalism in Indian would probably destroy the multi-cultural, multi-lingual India. But this selective quoting is hardly surprising. Media houses today are sharply divided on ideological lines and the viewers/readers are left to do their own research.

Bimala, are you listening?

Back to Ghare-Baire. The story portrays Sandip, the revolutionary, as a selfish man. He would entice others to give up imported food, clothing and accessories, while he himself is unable to give up imported cigarettes. He puts up an appearance of a simple man with only national interest at heart but prefers to live in luxury. He says, poverty drags down the energy of leaders. But his charm is such that Bimala, who has recently, at her husband’s coaxing, stepped out of the women’s quarter, falls for him. She believes every word he says and goes to the extent to stealing money from the family vault, to help him.

As I said earlier, all of Tagore’s works are timeless. They will resonate with us, no matter when you read them. So is Ghare-Baire. The three characters developed by Tagore are three categories, in which most of us would fit in. The Sandips – activists, orators, messiahs of the poor but at the same time extremely selfish and dual faced. The Nikhils – rational, won’t fall for mass movements, take their own informed stand, would not be popular with masses and would eventually succumb to actions of Sandips. Bimalas – fresh arrivals into the real world, gullible, passionate, impressionable, wannabe saviours and eventually disillusioned.

Since Tagore portrayed the nationalist side of Sandip, let us try the other side. The Socialist Sandips. These are the D. Rajas, Brinda Karats, Hardik Patels and Tessta Setalvads of today. They would masquerade as mass leaders, the face of farmers, Dalits, the minorities and the disenfranchised. They would take the stage and give a brilliant speech. They would try hard to win over the Nikhils but would eventually make do with Bimalas. They are the ones who would wear Khadi and cotton to public rallies and would silently enjoy their single malts after a hard day at “work”. They are the ones who would decry privatisation and American capitalism but would send their children to American universities. They are the D. Rajas who appear to be the representatives of the poor but claim 65 lakhs as air travel expense in a year. In the film, when Bimala confesses to Nikhil about the theft from the family vault, Nikhil says, “Now you know how difficult it is to say no to Sandip”. This is pretty much what the Bimals of today experience. They know they are being cheated but are so in awe of the Sandips that they simply brush aside such double standards and follow them religiously.  

The Bimalas of today are mostly university students, the painters, the writers, the actors, the historians, the theatre walas and other such. Mostly young, impressionable and wannabe saviours. They want to save the world, from nationalism, Trumpism, capitalism, Fascism and other isms. They all look up to the Sandips. They are ready to jump in at the slightest nudge. They form self-help groups where they help each other by sharing, loving, commenting, on the social media contents put up by the Sandips. No matter how stupid, incorrect or immoral the content is, it gets widely circulated and soon becomes popular. They are the Humans of Hindutva, The Wire, The Scroll and such. Spreading pure hatred and claiming victimhood. Many of these Bimalas end up disillusioned sooner or later. Remember the Bimalas of Delhi who rallied behind Kejriwal?

Finally the Nikhils. They are the worst off. No one wants to listen to them. Because they talk of taking a rational stand. And that requires a lot of research and tough decisions. They tell people not to blindly follow an ideology or an ism just because others are doing so. They tell people not to believe everything that appears on the internet. They tell people to see things in a context and make sense of it. But then The Nikhils are asking for too much. If every one of us were so adept at rational thinking we would not have seen outdated ideologies like Communism getting elected. We would not have seen people getting hysterical about a cinema that they haven’t even seen. Then we would not have seen people shamelessly defending Aurangzeb for his ruthless and communal reign over India. But just like in the novel, Nikhils are meant to die, metaphorically at least.