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.

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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.

When stunts go wrong

It is common in the film industry to have a body double to perform stunts, which are too dangerous to be performed by the protagonist. Stunts are important because the audience loves thrill, action and edge of the seat adrenalin rush. That’s when they come out saying, “paisa wasool ho gaya” (I got value for my money).  Stunts is a risky job despite all the precautions that are taken. The harness, the cushions and now the computer, which can turn a stuffed toy into a tiger, make the act more of an art than a dare. The job is still not risk free and that’s probably the reason the demand for stunt actors still exists. The stuntman or stuntwoman is someone who risks his or her life to earn a living and earns applause for the protagonist in the process.

 

The real life

Now, human mind is very creative. It has the power to read patterns and adapt itself to the events around them. Here is where the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) enters the scene. It started off as a people’s movement that captured the imagination of youth. Its evolution from a street movement to a political force and eventually power holder in Delhi was carefully carried out with a charm offensive targeted at the youth. But the recent events of a major split in the party ranks, ouster of the ideologues Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav and a series of stings involving top leadership has left the party clutching at straws to save its image. The youth needed another event to charm it, to restore the credibility of the movement.

 

The reel life

Veeru climbed the water tank and threatened suicide. The villagers left what they were doing and gathered at the foot of the tank. They pleaded him to climb down and made all attempts to convince Mausi to promise Basanti’s hand in marriage to Veeru. Once promised, the suicide is called off and the scene ends. While Veeru was threatening suicide, Jai was calm as a cucumber and made no attempt to stop his friend from jumping to his death. He obviously has called his bluff. He said, “jab daaru utregi to yeh bhi utar jayega”. But that was cinema, takes, retakes and more retakes.

 

The real life

The Aam Aadmi Party chose this classic scene from Sholay to charm its audience. After all who does not love some drama? So Gajendra, a politician in making, who was in touch with Manish Sisodia might have been chosen to play Veeru. Kejriwal will play Jai the indifferent friend who knows what is happening. Thus started the drama. Gajendra perched himself up on a tree with a broom, which also happens to be the party emblem of AAP. He started sloganeering, tied a towel around his neck and threatened suicide. He said his crop was damaged and the wanted to kill himself. The speeches by AAP continued below and the police stood by. People watched Gajendra do his sloganeering, some might have urged him to climb down but that did not seem to have any effect.

While all this was going on, Jai the indifferent friend, Arvind Kejriwal, kept silent. It appears he knew Gajendra was playing Veeru. He also knew that unlike the screen Veeru Gajendra was not allowed any retakes nor were there any safety harness to save him should he slip. Real life stunts cannot be the same as reel life stunts. He did slip and hung himself. A tragic loss of life. A woman lost her husband, three children lost their father and the AAP grabbed a lot of headline.

The director and the stunt man

A man who claimed to be a devastated farmer was a professional safa expert and owned a fairly large plot of family land. News reports suggest that there was no apparent reason for him to commit suicide, other than a domestic row he had a few day ago.

 

Reports also suggest that he was a party hopper who switched his allegiance from the BJP to SP to Congress and recently to the AAP. His alleged meeting with Manish Sisodia at 11 AM on the day of his suicide raises some important questions. He might have met him to further his political ambitions or to discuss the stunt, we may never know. But what we know is that his death was probably a political stunt that went horribly wrong. The usual blame game has begun and will probably continue for a few days before the public memory fades and something new catches its fancy.

The one thing that has emerged from the fiasco of a rally that AAP organised is that Kejriwal and his AAP will go to any extent to further their political ambitions. Gajendra is a small sacrifice on the long road Kejriwal has chosen for himself. This is dangerous. Bollywood should be restricted to cinemas, the day it enters our streets we will be left at the mercy of directors like AAP. They will not flinch at coaxing another Veeru to climb a tree.