Long on Vision, Short on Sight

The plan focused on contract farming and land consolidation, both of which call for large landholdings. Farmers with small landholdings would sell, creating a workforce that would move to the towns, and agriculture would become more efficient. Such a plan would have required the creation of several million jobs — jobs that illiterate farmers who had never done anything else in their life would be qualified for.

As Chengala Reddy of the Federation of Farmers’ Associations wryly commented, the plan may have been good for agriculture but it certainly held no hope for agriculturists. And so, in the decade that Naidu was in power, nearly 60 per cent of the population continued to depend on agriculture but, tellingly, the share of agriculture in the GDSP went down from 24.62 to 13.13 per cent.

The problems of farmers under Naidu stem directly from his ‘vision’. Though the vast majority of farmers in the state farm marginal landholdings or land on lease, their concerns were never factored into a policy bent on getting them out of the way.

Ironically, but perhaps in keeping with Naidu’s pro-liberalisation image, small farmers growing commercial crops such as cotton and chilly were left to their fate in an unregulated free market. Credit for agriculture was available at rates of interest settled simply by the laws of demand and supply.

Free choice was available for the purchase of seeds and pesticides, with farmers unable to tell between the spurious and genuine. And prices for the produce were again set by the market. The entire Agriculture Extension service of the government virtually stopped functioning till election-eve. The results were disastrous, and the fate of the chilly crop in Guntur this year is a good illustration.

K Purnachandra Rao of Nadendla committed suicide by consuming pesticide shortly after failing to receive a remunerative price for his chilly crop. P Srinivasa Rao of Etukur committed suicide after he ran up a huge debt on the chilly he had planted after taking four acres on lease. And V Jayrao, a man whose farming abilities were so well respected in his village of Inavolu that he had no difficulty getting 20 acres of land on lease year after year, committed suicide after the losses on the chilly planted on just 2.5 acres totalled up to more than Rs 80,000.

The crisis was predictable. The high prices — touching Rs 4,000 a quintal last year — combined with the drought to force paddy farmers to shift to chilly and cotton. The area under chilly went up from 1.2 lakh acre to 1.6 lakh acre, the output went up from the normal 60 to 65 lakh bags (of 40 kg each) to over 1 crore bags.

Currently, with the 69 cold storages full, the farmer has no choice but to get whatever price he can, and these have gone as low as Rs 1,700 a quintal in the open market. The government agencies have intervened in the procurement far too late and in numbers that are only having a marginal impact.

The entire process of advance notice to the government on this crisis, of proper advice to farmers, should have been mediated through the agriculture department. But in the past 12 years, no new appointments were made to this department. By 2002, Guntur district had just 200 agriculture extension workers. Given the size of the districts in Andhra, the extension worker: farmer ratio sunk to one of the lowest in the country.

Admits B J M Choudhary, joint director, agriculture, in Guntur that the taskforce was spread so thin, the department just could not reach out to farmers. Neither could it check the vast and illegal trade in pesticides and seeds.

For crops such as cotton and chilly where the input costs range from Rs 15,000 to Rs 25,000 per acre — almost Rs 10,000 more than for paddy — the risks are doubly high. But farmers left with no choice turned for advice on seeds, pesticides and fertilisers, even on the crop they should sow, to each other and to the owner of the fertiliser and pesticide stores who offered them credit. It was in the interest of these shopowners to peddle products that offered them the best returns rather than products that offered the farmer the best returns.

Last year, elections staring him in the face, Naidu woke up to the problem. Agriculture extension officers were contracted. The numbers indicate the scale of the problem. In Guntur alone, 400 new appointments were made. N Srinivas Rao, agriculture extension officer in Nadendla mandal, was one of those appointed on a six-month contract for Rs 5,000 pm.

He is a conscientious worker, keeping meticulous records and taking his job seriously, but his experience speaks for itself. He has a B.Sc degree in botany with no training in agriculture. His only training for extension work: a three-day workshop before he was sent out to advise farmers.

Choudhary admits the problem. ‘‘But what can we do, we have to follow the prescribed roster system in appointments and we have even had to settle for people who have just cleared class X.’’

And even as Srinivas Rao was Naidu’s last best hope to tackle the crisis the chief minister himself had precipitated, Rao and his father continued to farm their own 5 acres in the nearby Irlapadu. The crops they have planted over the past few years are chilly and cotton — in this drought there is no real choice — and he is facing the same problems that he is supposed to help farmers guard against. He and his father have already owe close to Rs 80,000, most of it to private sources. Naidu may be gone, his legacy is visible not just in Cyberabad but all over rural Andhra.