Farmers' stir: Old questions need new answers

Farmers should stop playing the victim card and adopt progressive cultivation practices, integrated agriculture solutions, crop diversification, ete.

- CHANDER SABHARWAL

I have been involved in agriculture and crop -protection since 1966, and in academics since 1987, sensitising MBA students about rural India, about its diversity. I have interacted with farmers on their farms across India, especially in the northern belts of cotton, paddy, wheat, and sugarcane. I have dealt with dealers and aartias' and shroffs, and commission agents who dominate the money spends for cash crops, lend at 2% p.a. interest, barter produce, provide inputs, and have for generations been the central Bhagwan (God) of the farming community, for all his concerns, from marriages to machinery, from elections to health. Historically, after partition, feudalism gave way to land reforms; land ceilings; and governments intervened to support farmers with subsidies on electricity, fertilisers, and waivers of loans due to floods and droughts. Wheat, rice and sugarcane came under annual government buying programs, through use of minimum support pricing, initially arbitrarily, later using the Swaminathan Commission proposals.

While Jawaharlal Nehru and later governments gave huge attention to industrialization, institution building, agriculture remained  backward, and a victim arena that housed the "annadatas" and the vote banks, with income tax on the segment, and other levies, being exempted. Continued use of old cultivation methods and tillage have shrunk the water table (1 meter annually), and crop diversification initiatives are a far cry. The inheritance laws have fostered the partition of land, and today marginal farmers own on an average 1.08 hectares of cultivable land per capita and a majority less than 0.5 ha. Even with the best inputs and yields, with support pricing, such farmers cannot find profitability in their operations. They lose annually.

They borrow, lose more and borrow more. Aartias and commission agents have a field day. Everything comes out of perpetual indebtedness. For tractors, mechanization, pumps, tillers etc.