A Famine Of Ideas For Farmers

There simply are no easy solutions to the crisis in Indian agriculture, a product of decades of neglect and poor policies

- Sutanu Guru

IT IS QUITE MACABRE, really — the barely concealed glee that seems to course through liberal analysts and intellectuals whenever it looks like Prime Minister Narendra Modi is heading for trouble. Macabre, because as the latest series of protests and events centred around farmers show, it is as ghoulish as dancing on corpses. Soon after violence erupted in Madhya Pradesh, pundits pontificated on how the Modi regime, fed on an overdose of hubris, was neglecting the farm sector. But was it?

One of the key promises in the recent Budget presented by finance minister Arun Jaitley has been a massive focus on agriculture — with a solemn pledge to double farm income in five years. But Maharashtra farm leader Raju Shetti, who had smashed some bastions of Sharad Pawar and who has been quoted in a related article in this issue, had dismissed the promise as hype without any substance. His alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Maharashtra is now at a breaking point, despite the announcement of farm loan waivers. In many ways, he is right in saying that all the focus on the farmer is more hype than substance. Well-known farm analyst Devender Sharma is even more evocative when he says that India has displayed a strange knack of mollycoddling the corporate sector with socialism, while asking farmers to face the uncertain onslaughts of capitalism.