Over the last week, the fissure in our economic structure has come to the forefront in a very cruel form. The suicide rate of farmers has been increasing. Political leaders advance the contention that farming can no longer be an occupation to depend upon. The farmer of today does not want his child to be a farmer of tomorrow. He would be happier with his child being a peon with an industrial house for whose benefit the farmer is dispossessed of his land.
Alongside, one learns that the Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) in Cuttack has developed protein-rich and high yielding rice. There is a mismatch somewhere between our technological advance such as above and its effective implementation for the benefit of the society. The research at the Cuttack-based institute may enrich farmers in other States, but incongruously enough, the farmer in Odisha would not even be aware of it. He is already more aware of the overburden of debt with repeated crop failures.
Add to it instances like eight minor irrigation projects in Koraput district lying incomplete for the past seven years! The major one amongst them started in 2009. All of them are incomplete. One of the reasons for non-implementation is non-acquisition of the required land. The land acquisition of the colonial era does not seem to have subserved the needs of irrigation as an essential input of agricultural growth. But the tenacity and speed of land acquisition for nonagricultural purposes has been often on an emergent basis through extralegal methods.
Farmers, as a class, in most of the countries, receive community support because they ensure food security. The benefits extended to the agricultural sector or class in the West are significantly higher than in India. According to a World Trade Orgnisation finding, India’s total farm subsidy stands at 56 billion dollars. This caters to approximately 120 million Indians, who are engaged in fulltime or part-time cultivation. The US spends as an average farm subsidy an amount of approximately 30 billion dollars, some two million farmers, ranchers and other agricultural avenues. In the European Union, the payment for benefit of agricultural class is around 58 billion Euros and the beneficiaries are around 27 million.
*We have also witnessed the paradoxical situation of the story of potato in Odisha. First, there was a potato famine. Now, the potato farmer is in utter distress, unable to sell his produce and is fighting for survival. The attitude of the State is not of participatory help; it is more in the nature of doling out alms.
In this scenario, a study into the causes of farmers’ suicide has not yet been available in any organised form, but it is necessarily out of a combination of factors, and indebtedness is the major one amongst them. A study conducted in 2014 identified three factors, which accounted for seventy-five per cent of farmers’ suicide. They are uneconomic land holding, excessive reliance on cash crops and debts increasing year by year. Additionally, they are also subjected to cruelties of corruption, inefficiency, difficulties in accessing finance and lack of social security relating to medical and other needs.
The effect of the forecast of a likely disturbance in the monsoon leading to a drought-like situation would be devastating. When we are attempting to assert that we “make in India”, it would be ironical if food security is threatened and we console ourselves with the idea of the bounties of industrialisation. This requires an overhaul of policies and an overhaul of the agricultural sector, and the sector has to be viewed comprehensively, including fisheries, animal husbandry, horticulture, floriculture and the like.
This would also further require restructuring the landholdings and converting agriculture into an attractive and fruitful occupation. It is quite disturbing to read news reports that the ayacuts with irrigation facilities are being acquired for industry on the condition that the concerned industrial unit shall provide compensatory irrigation. This reprehensible step is contrary to the interest of the society. Many such aberrations are the outcome of a mindless selection of land, mostly as per the dictates of the beneficiary industrial unit.
Paying lip service to the needs of the agriculturists, but in practice acting contrary and insensitive to their real chronic problems, is about to cost us dear. New “temples” of India may come into existence as citadels of the rich, but there will be no sufficient products to make any offerings at these temples. An ordinary industrialist or an industrial worker enjoys enormous amount of social security in employment, remuneration, provident fund, medical facilities and many other social supports.
But the hands that toil to give us food are not fortunate enough to have similar protections. They are at the mercy of the vagaries of nature and are denied basic infrastructure. There is no sick industry for the farmers. There are hardly any suicides by industrial workers or industrialists, but there are plenty of them when we came to farmers. They are disturbingly on the increase.
A society and its Government cannot be casual about these dangerous and alarming symptoms. When there is demonstrative apathy and insensitivity in this regards, the youth power must now rise to the occasion. Around seventy per cent of our own people, who feed us, must be the concern of the majority of voters, i.e., the youth, who are by design being misdirected into servility and servitude to the powers that be. The fire in the bellies has to radiate effects with no further loss of time. We must arise, awaken and act immediately. This certainly concerns us all!
(The writer, a Senior Advocate, is a former All India Service officer, a former diplomat, a former editor, a former President, Orissa High Court Bar Association and a former Advocate General of Odisha. jayantdas@hotmail.com)