Green Revolution was the worst thing to happen to the small Indian farmer
Farmer suicides have been one of the most puzzling tragedies of our time. Notwithstanding many tall claims of the state, following several studies and reports, over the last more than two decades, the phenomenon remains stubbornly resilient and has only grown in its scale and complexity. Of late, there have been some attempts to offer an analysis of the phenomenon, including the painfully bizarre one linking it to failed love affairs and even impotency in the countryside. The truth, however, is that there are some clear trends and that is where we need to focus on, to get to the roots of the crisis, instead of trying to establish farfetched correlations, especially where there exists none.
One of the trends has been that most of these suicides, which are being reported, are largely from the erstwhile Green Revolution (GR) belts, such as Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab etc. Is there a connection here? To see that, we will have to look at and beyond the set of "triumph narratives" that are associated with the so called Green Revolution. It's a fairly established fact now that the idea of the Green Revolution catered to the rich, large landholding farmers of the region. Small and the lower middle peasantry progressively lost its stake and eventually their voice in the larger state-sponsored scheme, the freebies of which mostly contributed to the consolidation of the big farmers.
These are the states, incidentally, where the great experiment of GR-technology, first claimed to have established a grand connection between profit and agriculture, severing the age-old umbilical connection between agriculture and food. So it was in a sense, a kind of watershed moment for our agrarian history. Over the years, as the glittering tableau from Punjab that passed across the Rajpath on Republic Day, year after year, celebrated the agri-prosperity of Punjab, the feeble cry of smaller farmers and landless labourers were lost amidst the cacophony of a development paradigm that only nursed the ego of the elites or what an anthropologist called, the gentlemen farmers.
It is these segments of the peasantry, the lower middle and the smaller ones, I argue, that has been the worst hit and subsequently became most vulnerable. Till GR-technology continued to engage with the food crops, the impact was still not as severe. It is only when the regime entered more hi-end, export-oriented non-food, cash-crop brand of agriculture, such as Bt cotton, grapes etc, that this segment of the farmers faced the worst ever scenario. This was the regime of high promises of pesticides, bloated idea of profit-making seeds, spurious dreams of rich harvest. This was the phase of the '90s, when India started playing "kaun banega crorepati", a new culture of overnight success swayed the general cultural fabric. Here was a multicrore idea which made just one crorepati, sold dreams to millions and yet became hugely popular and saleable. On a lighter note, but no less meaty and instructive, Amitabh Bachchan, the erstwhile messiah of the proletarian cause on the celluloid reappeared as a dream merchant to anchor the show.
Osmosis of this "quick bucks value" in the culture of agriculture in India followed similar trajectory. Its seeds worked for a few, failed thousands. The lure of quick, good returns understandably received more attention from the on-the-edge segment which was doing agriculture against all odds but could never have enough to "show off"; afflicted by that ubiquitous human frailty to outsmart the others, to match the pompousness of the big land lords in the vicinity. The new regime gave that hope, that "at last" moment of social redemption, liberation from that eternal sense of doom.
In the neo-liberal regime where ideas travelled freely, marketing its inflated benefits, there were very little or no preparation or even a pretension of any safety net to safeguard the interests of the marginal and the lower middle farmers. Local moneylenders prospered, agribusiness MNCs consistently showed multifold annual profits, pesticide and fungicide companies mushroomed and flourished. The villages became a free for all sites of experimentation and profit-making. While stories of promises were marketed, the flip sides of the story, of vulnerability, susceptibility and demands of the new crop, remained mysteriously underplayed. In a crisis situation there was none to look back to. In olden time, when they grew wheat and rice, they still had some traditional reservoir of wisdom to counter the crisis. New cash crop regime and its fortunes depended heavily on specialists, international market fluctuations; extension services agents and external technical knowhow. This almost complete dependence on externalities severely compromised with the autonomy of the farmers' world.
In a village visit with my students to Punjab, some months back, a septuagenarian farmer, Charanjit Singh, summarised the confusion that characterised the universe of agriculture today. He recounted: "Earlier we knew about a few seed companies and of one or two fungicides and pesticides; but today there are more than a dozen who visit us and we have no skill to test or verify their claims. Many a times they sell spurious seeds and other chemicals and the cost is borne by debt-ridden, poor farmers". What this farmer narrated, speaks volume about the condition of those multitude of farmers who, though have been encouraged to dream big, and there is no harm in it, but lack that requisite wherewithal to withstand the vagaries of such an agriculture.
It is not that farmers were any better off earlier. The seeds of discontent and crisis that are forcing them to suicides now, have a complex causative culturo-economic background. With villages getting individualised, shared community spaces getting shrunk and the intra-community trust deficit widening further, those at the edge find suicide an easy option. Technology is never neutral. What works in Beijing might not work in Bundelkhand. And vice versa. If India is serious about its farmers, it will have to prepare its grounds well, grounds that more than the two-third of its farmers, mostly small and marginal, could be able to cultivate on. Mere lip service to the cause of the peasantry may yield rich electoral dividends but it will not be able to arrest the decline of the agriculture and in turn our society.