Prasenjit Chowdhury
On the face of it, Prime Minister Narendra Modi put his mind where his mouth is. The higher allocation for the rural sector and farming suggests that he considers rural recovery as key to overall GDP growth. Some time ago, he spoke of the need to make agriculture employment-oriented and how it, along with manufacturing and service sectors, forms backbone of the country’s economy.
The Union Budget 2016-17 introduced a 0.05 per cent ‘Krishi Vikas Cess’ on all services to fund its ambitious programme of rural welfare besides keeping aside outlays for setting up Self-Help Groups (SHGs) for rural development and for the National Food Security Mission (NFSM) to boost pulses production.
Not to miss the thrust on rural road connectivity in the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) and the marquee crop insurance scheme, Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), launched in 2015-16 with a generous allocation
(Rs 19,000 crore and Rs 5,500 crore respectively). If the farmers get the benefit of Minimum Support Price (MSP) as envisaged, it might prevent many farmers’ suicides.
Talking about farmers’ suicides, the enormity of which long demanded public policy interventions, it is important to recount that more than a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years – the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. A great number of those affected are cash crop farmers, and cotton farmers in particular.
In 2009 alone, 17,638 farmers committed suicide – that’s one farmer every 30 minutes. Going by the official data, on average nearly 16,000 farmers committed suicide every year over the last decade or so. Every seventh suicide in the country had been a farm suicide.
According to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB), as many as 5,650 farmers committed suicide in India in 2014, among which five states – Maharashtra, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka – accounted for about 90 per cent of the total farmer suicides. As per NCRB data, bankruptcy or indebtedness was the main cause, accounting for 20.6 per cent, closely followed by family issues (20.1 per cent), failure of crops (16.8 per cent), illness (13.2 per cent), while drug abuses/alcoholic addiction accounted for 4.9 per cent cases. These five causes together accounted for 75.6 per cent of total farmer suicides.
In Maharashtra, that tops the list of states in the country in terms of the number of farmers’ suicide, it has been seen that frequent droughts, crop failure, non-realisation of prices for agricultural products are some of the reasons pushing farmers to take the extreme step.
But what is the bigger picture? Farm-policy analysts point out how desperation arising out of a fundamental unsustainability is pushing people out of the countryside far faster than industry can create jobs for them in cities and towns. It is exacerbated by the decree that the government can force farmers to sell their land for infrastructure projects without seeking their consent.
Address agrarian distress
Prominent environmental activists like Vandana Shiva are of the opinion that genetically-modified seeds – specifically, “suicide seeds” sold by the agricultural behemoth Monsanto – are driving farmers to lose control of their age-old farming practices as its proprietary policies forbid farmers from planting, selling, or even ‘accidentally’ growing seeds from its patented crops thus pushing them to an edge.
The perceived consensus has been in favour of the need to design interventions that can address distress among various demographic groups, and not aggravate the problem by focusing on indebtedness alone. And such interventions not merely mean offering “special packages” but a pre-emptive long-term policy. For instance, poor health has been found to lead to more than seven times as many suicides as compared to debt or bankruptcy.
So health reform, particularly in rural areas, is a worthier interventionist goal to achieve.
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, posing himself as an agrarian activist, had been too nebulous to point out to the shortcomings of crop insurance and the imperfect rollout of bank accounts needed to receive compensation payments. He chose rather to make a fetish of his pro-farmer identity, regardless of the growing uncertainties of farming as a vocation in India.
It has been pointed ad nauseam that while nearly half of India’s population works in agriculture, they produce only 14 to 18 per cent of GDP, compared to, say, the United States, where farmers constitute around 1 to 2 per cent of the workforce and represent an approximately equal share of GDP. The 65 per cent of farm households owning less than one hectare of land are usually seen to spiral into debt, only to be buoyed by periodic waivers of farm loans.
Addressing economic causes leading to erosion in farm income, exposed to both production and market risks, is liable to procedural error when institutions such as Agricultural Insurance Company undertake crop damage estimates at block or sub-block levels and not at the individual farm level. Any solid mechanism for market risk evaluation is not in place. The low penetration of crop insurance (not more than 25 per cent of farmers) and the difficulty of claiming farmer insurance and settlement might not make it a panacea.
Going by the nature of objections over the 2015 land bill brought in by the NDA government, the tendency to bypass the consent and social-assessment requirements of the 2013 law on the grounds that they are onerous and time-consuming is visible. On the flip side, the rich farmer with his access to free/ subsidised water and electricity, to free fertiliser and benefits from minimum support price that the government offers on the purchase of rice and wheat must be brought under the tax net.
The Economic Survey points out that the implicit subsidy on electricity is Rs 37,170 crore. The farmers committing suicide are martyrs to the final, lumbering churn of India in its transition from agrarianism to industrialism. We must keep a close watch if policy interventions can really buck this trend.
