For four years in a row, Pradeep Sharma, a potato grower from Agra district in UttarPradesh has been suffering losses. Cultivating potatoes in 10 acres this year, he brought 19,000 kg to the mandi only to get a profit of Rs 490 after selling his entire produce. In anger, he sent his paltry earnings to the Prime Minister saying perhaps he will come to understand my problems. A few days earlier, a Madhya Pradesh farmer, Bherulal Malviya, had died of shock after selling his 27,000 kg of onions for just Rs 10,000 in Mandsaur market.
Such distressing media reports depicting the misery of the farming community have donned the media headlines for quite some time now. With losses mounting over the years, farmers have been literally surviving on loans, taking credit from both formal and informal sources. As of Sept 2016, Rs 12.60-lakh crores was the outstanding agricultural loan. Compare this with the average income of Rs 20,000 per year in 17 states, roughly half the country, the desolation is clear.
Picture the terrible agrarian distress that prevails in the ongoing debate over whether farm loan waiver is the right answers to address farmer’s woes, and secondly, how will the state governments bear the fiscal burden? The speed at which the newly elected Chief Minister’s of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh have announced farm loan waivers soon after assuming office, questions are being asked over the ‘economic viability’ of an otherwise ‘politically sound’ measure, the bigger question being tossed around is where will the money come from?
It doesn’t end here. After Telangana launched the trend-setting Rythu Bandhu programme providing a fixed amount of Rs 8,000 per acre (now raised to Rs 10,000) per year as direct income support to farmers, it has triggered a chain reaction among States to announce similar or improved versions of financial aid. First, the erstwhile Congress government in Karnataka came up with similar package to provide Rs 5,000 per hectare to dryland farmers, and after the recent electoral debacle in the Hindi heartland, and fearing the Congress and BJP’s promise to waive farm loans if voted to power, and obviously in an effort to woo farmers ahead of the forthcoming Assembly elections, Odisha declared an economic package. Instead of a loan waiver, Odisha announced Rs 10,180-crore package for three years under the Krushak Assistance for Livelihood and Income Augmentation (KALIA) programme for land owning farmers, tenant farmers as well as landless labourers and sharecroppers. This will benefit 57-lakh households.
Jharkhand was quick to follow it up with Rs 2,250-crore schemes to help 22.76 lakh small and marginal farmers with a financial support of Rs 5,000 per acre per year, with an upper limit of 5 acres. And while Haryana is contemplating a pension scheme for farmers, West Bengal was quick to come up with Krishak Bandhu Scheme under which each farmer will get cash support of Rs 10,000 per acre per year. In addition, it will provide a life insurance cover of Rs 2 lakh per farmer, irrespective of the cause, for farmers between the age of 18 and 60. The premium will also be paid by the state government.
Let’s first look at the loan waivers. After Chhattisgarh announced the farm loan waiver, Rs 1,248-crore has already been transferred to bank accounts of 3.5 lakh farmers in the first phase, waiving a maximum of Rs 2-lakh each. In Punjab, despite the slow progress, a total of 4.14 lakh small and marginal farmers who had defaulted on cooperative and commercial banks have got a loan waiver of approximately Rs 3,500-crore. For the country as a whole, a total of Rs 2.3-lakh crore of farm loans announced by Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu will benefit and estimated 3.4-crore farm families.
Compare this with corporate loan write-offs. This will tell us where the money is getting siphoned-off. According to the Reserve Bank of India, in the four year period between April 2014 and April 2018, Rs 3.16-lakh crore has been written-off while only Rs 32,693-crore of the outstanding amount has been recovered. Accordingly, as on Sept 30, 2018, besides the public sector undertakings, there were only 528 borrowers who had non-performing assets (NPAs) of Rs 6.28-lakh crore while only 95 of them had defaults exceeding Rs 1,000-crore. While no questions are being asked about the ‘economic viability’ of the massive write-offs of a handful of corporate waivers, a lot of heat is being unnecessarily generated over farm loans depicting a clear-cut bias in economic thinking.
Meanwhile, gross NPAs have further increased by a whopping 11.2 per cent reaching Rs 10.39-lakh crore in 2017-18, and only Rs 40,400-crores have been recovered through the much touted Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) and Sarfaesi Act. The surge in NPAs is happening despite providing an economic stimulus of Rs 18.60-lakh crore to the industry in the past 10 years. It was in 2008-09 that the government started a stimulus package of Rs 1.86-lakh crore to the industry at the time of global economic meltdown in 2008-09, a package that still continues. In simple terms, the industry is getting a direct income support every year.
Although considered to be ‘less distorting’ than farm loan waivers, reports indicate that the Centre is looking at the possibility of providing a direct income support of Rs 4,000 to farmers. Estimates point that the proposed direct support will cost the exchequer Rs 2-lakh crore. While this amount may appear big, the fact of the matter is that Rs 4,000 a year comes to less than Rs 340 a month, almost equal to the price of two cups of coffee/tea at any trendy coffee shop. If Rs 340 per month is considered to be an appropriate financial sop for the beleaguered farming community, it only shows the extent of deprivation and income inequality that prevails.
While farm loan waivers are an economic necessity, and the state governments will have to find adequate resources, direct income support should not be seen as a permanent solution to the agrarian crisis. Agriculture needs a set of robust reforms in addition to the immediate sops being considered. Let 2019 be the year of agricultural reforms, and if the government can provide 7,000 steps, both small and big, for ease of doing business I see no reason why a similar amount of initiatives cannot be considered for ease of doing agriculture. After all, it involves 52 per cent of the country’s population. There lies the perfect economic prescription for Sabka saath, Sabka Vikas.
Let it be year of farm reforms. The Tribune. Jan 4, 2019
https://www.tribuneindia.com/
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