At a farm widow congregation in Punjab
A day after the massive farmer protest in New Delhi, hundreds of farmer widows had assembled at Mansa in Punjab. I sat there listening to the heart-rending testimonies of several farm widows, among the hundreds who had assembled at Mansa. In the land of Green Revolution, to see and meet hundreds of farm widows was not so easy. As they stood to narrate their painful stories, more often than not they just stood in front of the mike, said a few words and wept. The silence that followed said everything.
There is hardly a day when I don’t find news reports of farmers committing suicide. A study conducted jointly by the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana; Punjabi University, Patiala; and the Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar had in a house-to-house survey put the alarming death toll figures at 16,600 in the 17 year period, between the year 2000 and 2017. In other words, roughly 1,000 farmers and farm workers have taken the extreme step of ending their life every year in the agriculture frontline State. As the serial death dance on the farm continues unabated, another study by the Punjabi University estimates that one in every three farmers in Punjab is living below the poverty line.
As the widows narrated their agony and enormous struggle, as to how they were coping with the huge void left behind by the only bread-earner in their family, I sat wondering why had Punjab, often called as the food bowl of the country, turned into a hotbed of farmer suicides. Why nearly 98 per cent of the rural household were in debt, and 94 per cent of these households had reported more monthly expenditure as compared to their gross incomes. In other words, the rural households in progressive Punjab were living in debt. To live in perpetual indebtedness, and that to year after year, generation after generation, is the worst humiliation that any human being can suffer. Former Prime Minister Charan Singh had rightly remarked that a farmer is born in debt and dies in debt. What he did not say was that living in indebtedness all through your life is akin to living in hell.
Listening to the farm widows, I tried to put the puzzle in place. If providing an assured Minimum Support Price (MSP) for crops, writing-off of outstanding farm loans, and expanding the irrigation network is primarily the recipe for ensuring farm prosperity then Punjab already has these in place. With 98 per cent assured irrigation, meaning that every farm gets an assured irrigation supply, and with the highest productivity of cereal crops – wheat, rice and maize – in the world, why is it that hundreds of farmers are still forced to commit suicide every year? If productivity and irrigation were the answer to the prevailing agrarian crisis then there is no reason why Punjab farmers should be dying. This only shows that the reasons behind the terrible agrarian crisis that prevail lie much beyond crop productivity and irrigation.
On top of it, Punjab has a very extensive and elaborate system of procurement of food crops. With a huge network of APMC mandis and purchase centres, Punjab has the best infrastructure for procurement of crops in the country. It also has a vast network of rural roads linking the mandiswith the villages. With mandis and rural link roads in place, whatever stocks are brought to these purchase centres and if it meets the quality specifications are purchase at the fixed support price. Over 98 per cent of the wheat and paddy that is brought to the mandis by farmers is purchased at the fixed price. Farmers are able to sell their produce at the officially declared Minimum Support price, which is much higher than the prevailing market prices. That’s the reason why truckloads of paddy are illegally transported all the way from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to be sold in Punjab mandis.
In addition, Punjab has also announced a farm loan waiver for a maximum of Rs 2-lakh per small and marginal farmer. Although the electoral promise was to waive all kinds of outstanding loans drawn on cooperative, private and nationalised banks, the State has so far promised to waive roughly about Rs 9,000-crore of farm loans of small and marginal farmers. Of which, approximately Rs 1,000-crore worth of farm loans have been waived off so far. In Maharashtra, against the initial estimate of Rs 34-lakh worth of farm loans to be waived, an estimated Rs 14-lakh crore is now planned to be struck out. Similarly, in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan where only a fraction of the promised loan amount is being actually waived. The problem is that despite the election promises the State governments do not have the resources to provide for writing-off the entire outstanding farm loans.
Each of the farm widows reeled out an amount of farm loan, varying between Rs 2-lakh to Rs 12-lakh that their deceased husbands left behind. And that made me wonder how come the economic situation had reached such a despicable levels despite Punjab offering the best of rural infrastructure, irrigation and technological advance.
0 comments:
Post a Comment