Sowing discontent

Monday’s firing on agitating farmers in Madhya Pradesh’s Betul district, conforms to a sadly familiar pattern. Just three months ago, similar scenes were enacted in Haryana’s Mahendragarh district when six farmers were killed in police firing while they were agitating for free electricity. The farmers in Betul, frustrated over the damage that the recent hailstorms and floods had done to their crops, allegedly tried to set a police vehicle on fire in protest against State apathy. At least 16 died in the subsequent police action. Both incidents were as tragic as they were avoidable. They underline the tremendous frustration in the countryside, especially among the farming community. Rightly or wrongly, there is a growing view that policies and plans that are being evolved in the urban power centres of the country are not sufficiently sensitive to grassroot reality.

Political expediency has made the situation worse. One of the favourite electoral ploys of ambitious politicians is to promise free electricity, state subsidies and loans for farmers. Subsequent governments find it difficult, even impossible, to honour such commitments. And so the tensions grow. While the Union and state governments do have a responsibility to protect the interests of farmers, they should at the same time guard against creating a dependency syndrome whereby the responsibility for every reversal, natural or otherwise, is laid at the door of the State. The old Confucian adage that giving a man a fish will provide him a meal, but teaching him to fish will ensure a lifetime’s meals, holds true in this instance as well. It’s far better if systems like crop insurance and cheap credit are put in place to deal with periods of distress.

There is little doubt that the agricultural sector is a neglected one and that rural poverty persists, as do widening income disparities. Even in the country’s most prosperous state — Punjab — things are far from sanguine. A recent study conducted by the Punjab Agricultural University revealed that farming is no longer a profitable venture, largely because of fragmented land holdings. An owner-cultivator of a nine-acre farm in the state, stands to earn something like Rs 67,500 per annum. If the average number of people in his family is six, their per capita income works out to Rs 1,100 per month. This technically puts them below the poverty line. There has also been a tendency for the Union Finance Ministry to decrease budgetary allocations to the agricultural sector. The figure has come down from 2.6 per cent in 1991-’92 to 1.54 per cent in 1997-98. In September, the chairperson of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture had warned that the neglect of the farming sector could have dangerous consequences for the country’s food security. The anger and helplessness of Indian farmers, evidenced in the recent suicides of cotton growers in Andhra Pradesh or the turmoil in Betul and Mahendragarh symbolise this neglect eloquently.