The pattern in the suicides

Let us start with the so-called green revolution that is supposed to have brought about the 8220;problem of plenty8221;. It is a package essentially of copious irrigation water, the unbridled use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, that lead to booming yields of rice and wheat in Punjab, Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh and AP. But all the 8216;success8217; stories are confined to the land-rich farmer. When one transposes this 8216;high input technology8217; in the case of small and marginal farmers, who constitute the bulk of India8217;s farming community, problems surface.

Former AP chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu drew the maximum political mileage he could for his support to the NDA government by making New Delhi agree to lift all the surplus saleable rice from the land rich farmers of the state at an inflated minimum support price. The Committee on Agricultural Costs and Prices CACP is on record for having said how the farm lobby from Punjab has been able to inflate the cost of production of paddy and when this MSP is fixed for paddy, political allies of the Central government, who enjoyed the benefit of political leverage, brought home the dividends. But poor and marginal farmers, who cultivate groundnut, red gram, cotton, chilli, and so on, who have neither political nor financial clout, were left out of the bargain. These are the ones who took their lives when crops failed.

If, indeed, our agricultural research is meant to cater to the really needy farmer, how far has the country succeeded? This is a very unsettling question for which no satisfactory answer has emerged. As of now, almost all India8217;s field research, be it the development of a new crop variety or a new crop management technique, are confined to experimental farms, which are nothing more than an artifact, since they have no physical constraints. But the actual field experience is totally different. There are far too many constraints facing the small and marginal farmer.

What has been happening in India, ever since the so-called green revolution was set in motion, was to develop a technological package on the experimental farm and extrapolate it on the farmer8217;s field. When the farmer is land rich and has capital, he can afford to take risks, while a poor or marginal one cannot. Take the case of AP. There are at least 30 lakh farmers under the kauldari system land tenancy and even the free power facility would not reach them as the land is not in their names. A profile of the land holdings shows that marginal farmers, who constitute 60 per cent of the farming community, hold just 20 per cent of the land, while the small ones have 22 per cent and medium farmers 8212; who comprise 6 per cent 8212; hold 31 per cent of the land. This means that nearly a third of the land is held by the rich and super-rich farmers, who have no reason to commit suicide.

What should the alternative be? Start from the bottom upwards. Get to thoroughly know the problems farmers face, design experiments to answer crucial questions and lay out the experiments in the farmers8217; fields itself. This is easier said than done, because it would call for an entirely different approach to field developmental work and much more dedication to field work than working in the confines of air-conditioned laboratories. If a farmer does not use a specific technology, there is a reason why he does not do so. The reasons could be monetary, infrastructural or logistical. In other words, while the researcher is paid to do research, the farmer pays from his pocket to carry out what the researcher says. This is where farm technology has to be appropriate and relevant to local reality.

Microsoft Chief Bill Gates once said: 8220;Our primary assets, which are our software and software development skills do not show up on the balance sheet at all.8221; Obviously, he was referring to the intangible assets of his empire8212; the human skill, which does not show up in the billions on his balance sheets. The same thing can have been said about our agricultural experts.