Farmer suicide: Why killing Land Bill won't help
Put them on a pedestal, say you love them, and destroy them. Say Yatra Naryastu Poojyante! Check out the state of women in India. India lives in her villages. Check them out. The farmer is the annadaata. Decades of lip-service has reduced him to beggary. Put him on a pedestal, put him up on a tree, and let him hang. Then demand justice, before breaking down on TV. The Rabi crop has come a cropper, but adversity is the harvest season of politics.
Farmers are dying by the dozens every day. Moneybag industrialists are acquiring their prime land, thanks to a land ordinance. Mother Nature is pounding them with hailstones, and governments are doling out 100-rupee cheques that bounce. Rahul Gandhi has come back from his vacation to rescue the poor farmer, lest the Modi juggernaut run him over. This is not true, but feels so if you watch panellists tearing the government apart and political spokies shedding copious tears. Being generous with gyaan is not new, but these pinko-liberals need to be called out for what they are: Fake. This fakery in the name of farmers and povertarian politics has led us to this crossroads, where industrialisation and agriculture are the two poles of either and or. This binary has protected poverty, not the poor.
In post-1991 India, the growth rate shot up because our liberalised economy witnessed rapid industrial growth. The rate of agricultural growth didn't help. For agriculture to grow, India needs agrarian reforms, not agitations against industry. In his comeback speech, Rahul Gandhi described how 60 per cent of India was dependent on agriculture. His comrades quickly corrected the figure to 67 per cent. He also wondered as to why a man as politically shrewd as Modi would alienate the 67 per cent people of India. Since that figure is debatable, Rahul Gandhi should have pondered a little over the word "dependent". That's the tragedy. The figure is eminently debatable, but it is true that a large number of our rural populace is dependent on the fickle nature of Mother Nature. And, by the way, not all own land. The Dalits and the extremely poor do not. They depend on the land-owning mai-baap, and suffer the worst of casteism. Those claiming to be fighting on behalf of the poor are speaking for the land-owners, and it will not be wrong to say that this system has inherently been anti-Dalit. The Dalit; the extremely backward, who gets employment in a factory, will wear the uniform and refuse to do the bidding of the landowner. When politicians talk about the choice of the farmer, do they also talk about the choice of the farm labourer?
Imagine when 16 and not 60 per cent people depend on more or less the same land that is used for farming today. At present, the land-holding pattern is such that it keeps people below the poverty line. The number of landless goes up as the small landholding families break up every generation. Most poor farmers cannot leave the land, because there are no other avenues for employment, and the land is not enough to sustain them. The landless population has its own threshold. Since they do not own the land, they don't get bank loans, and fall prey to the local moneylenders. When the crop fails, they either die or remain in debt all their lives, or, kill themselves. Even when things are better, an illness in the family pushes them back by a decade. That's why when the National Sample Survey Organisation conducted its 2003 Situation Assessment Survey, it was discovered that 40 per cent of farmers wanted to quit their family profession because it's a loss-making proposition. Even those who made profit on their investment, found it difficult to carry on because their needs trumped that profit. A whopping 96, yes, 96 per cent, of farmers said that their consumption exceeded their income. That's why the distress is so widespread, and untimely or deficient rain only compounds the crisis.
The majority in this country has been miserable for decades, not because farm land was forcibly acquired, but because of the perennial problems of unemployment and lack of skills and education. As long as that gaping hole is not plugged, we will have people falling into it. The 2013 Land Bill made it virtually impossible to acquire land for any common purpose. It would have encouraged rent-seeking by politicians who play mediator between industry and farmers. The NDA's ordinance was a double disaster because the government needed other parties on board before launching it by force. That has queered the pitch so much today that the government is seen as anti-farmer; and the bill, suicidal.
The recent untimely rains have ravaged their Rabi. That's half the year's labour lost. They are busy re-building their lives and plotting their Kharif moves, instead of politicking. Governments - state and central - need to help them in standing on their feet again. And while doing that, let them know that they must begin insuring their crop against failure. That crop patterns need to change. That they need employment and income alternatives.
When politicians pull out figures like 4,000 farmers have committed suicide in Maharashtra in the last four years, they forget to mention that it's a recurring problem, and has not been brought upon them by the Land Bill. India needs to resolve this on priority. Killing the bill is not the solution. India must widen the scope for industry if it wants agriculture to make sense for its farmers. We can have both. There is a win-win situation instead of the lose-lose trap we have been in.