Wooing farmers for a harvest of votes

New Delhi seems to have made a valiant effort to woo the farmers — the country’s largest electorate, contributing to some 70 per c...

New Delhi seems to have made a valiant effort to woo the farmers — the country’s largest electorate, contributing to some 70 per cent plus voters, people connected with agriculture in one way or another. Finance Minister Jaswant Singh brought cheer to the farming community by letting it be known that if less than 6 per cent interest rate is good for the corporate empire, it is equally so for those who till the land and fill our granaries. And his brightest lines in the budget speech were: “Traditionally, banks have sought relatively higher security on credit for agriculture. To illustrate, banks insist on mortgaging the entire land holding of a farmer borrower, as security for advances for agricultural purposes. Banks, are, therefore, now being advised to assess individual credit-worthiness and not to routinely insist on additional collateral through a mortgage of the entire land holding…”

In one shot, the FM not only cast his net wide in terms of voters, but brought home long overdue succour to those who till the soil. The Rs 15,000 crore for co-operative banks to clean up their balance sheets is an admirable piece of action in this direction and the constitution of a high powered commission to look into the credit worthiness of agricultural loans is a right step to prop up the efforts.

Beyond this, much else that pertains to agriculture in the budget merits but little attention. The addition of 5 million to the “poorest of the poor” to make up the total to 20 million under the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) from the Below Poverty Line (BPL) population will hardly make a dent on alleviating hunger. India has the unenviable record in this regard, far worse than that of even Sub Saharan Africa where there never was a “green revolution” to fill granaries. To be precise, India is home to a third of the world’s most hungry — 860 million plus — most of whom are pregnant mothers, lactating women working in grueling situations and undernourished children exploited by unscrupulous employers for cheap labour.

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The total subsidy bill in the budget soars to Rs 27,800 crores of which Rs 2,000 crore (from the earlier Rs 1000 crore) is earmarked for the AAY where wheat is sold at Rs 2 a kg and rice at Rs 3 a kg. And it is difficult to clearly demarcate the BPL population and, given the rampant corruption, it is very doubtful whether the extra money spent on AAY would make any real dent in warding off hunger. Currently wheat is selling at Rs 1,000 plus a quintal, that is Rs 10 kg a kilo, and the lure to mop up wheat at Rs 2 kg and make a real killing is too big a temptation for the unscrupulous.

The real solution to India’s hunger lies in producing foodgrain in abundance to make it really cheap. That seems a lost hope given the lacklustre performance of India’s agricultural fraternity. The country’s in agricultural R&D very well with that of China and while China is racing ahead with the hybrid rice, our own plant genetic engineers have only been busy decoding the rice genome for the last almost five years now! And Jaswant Singh could not be faulted for not putting more into the ICAR kitty for agricultural “research”. He made a generous gesture of Rs 50 crore in the last year’s budget for horticulture and “precision farming” and nothing useful came out of it.

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