The Krushak Assistance for Livelihood and Income Augmentation (KALIA) scheme for three years from 2018-2022 with an amount of Rs 10,180 crore has been announced by the State Government for the benefit of the cultivators, small, marginal farmers, sharecroppers and agricultural labourers. It is being acknowledged that the loan waiver scheme is not helping the real farmers in managing agrarian distress; rather it has been beneficial to a small fraction of land owning farmers in enjoying a lion’s share of agriculture investment.
It is also being admitted that a large section of landless agricultural labourers is from SCs and STs for whom the State Government has offered to provide an assistance of Rs12, 500 per household under DBT mode for livelihood development through activities like goat rearing, duckery, fishery, beekeeping, mini layer units and mushroom cultivation. It is told that under these activities about 10 lakh landless labourers will be supported during three years.
Experience shows such kind of scheme is not new to the State and has proved a serious failure in the past because of a number of reasons, but some of the most important reason is absence of minimum land holding to do these activities and the economic viability of such micro schemes in helping a family to survive.
Economic development schemes must not be implanted as charity programme which end up with a failure to address the purpose. For last 70 years, there has been no initiative to change the basic socioeconomic structural issues in agriculture pertaining to agricultural labourers; rather the State Government has been promoting temporary relief measures with huge propaganda to fool the poor and illiterate people depending on the Government to see a change in their condition. The anti-poor economic policy of the Government has resulted in persistence of malnutrition, poverty, distress migration and low productivity in agriculture.
The State Government has not been implementing Scheduled Caste Sub Plan (SCSP) and Tribal Sub-Plan (TSP) since 1980 where there is provision of spending 40 per cent of the non-plan budget for SCs and STs who constitute 40 per cent of the population.
The agriculture labourers mostly belong to historically marginalised communities, SCs and STs, who have been facing worst form of social and ethnic based discrimination in rural and interior parts. The practice of untouchability is very much prevalent in villages preventing them to enter into any meaningful productive engagement in their own locality. The absence of public scope of any non-agricultural activities indirectly forces them to continue in agriculture though agriculture sector is unable to provide them employment throughout the year.
The failure of NREGS and continued natural calamities have been further restricting their scope of employment in their own locality as a result of which there is unrestricted rise in distress migration of rural agricultural labourers. The agriculture labourers are deprived of minimum wage, pension, and social security measures and compensation during natural calamities while the so-called farmers are compensated against their crop loss. This is largely denial of rights to social protection and development to the most neglected section of society.
The agriculture labourers’ hamlets are on the outskirts of the main villages as a majority of agriculture labourers have no homestead land, basic amenities, and are staying over the land of ex-zamindars or Government land. The lands are not settled in their names. Many such hamlets are not having status of a revenue village without basic amenities and social infrastructure for a decent living.
Though the State Government admits the presence of lakhs of landless families and is announcing schemes such as Vasundhara but there has been no serious attempt to implement such schemes. The present Government failed to ensure homestead land to all eligible landless families during last 20 years. Any poor household in the village interested in any economically productive activities must have minimum possession of land. The proposal of the Government for duckeryactivities needs water bodies but in reality while the landless poor agriculture labourers are suffering due to lack of homestead land to have a roof over their head and unable to collect adequate safe drinking water for the consumption of the family members, how they are going to feed the goat, hen, duck etc.
Is it not impractical to just offer them Rs12, 500 and asked them to go for economic activities? This is a serious joke with the landless poor people in rural areas. They have only their physical labour to sell as the main asset with them without which they have no sustenance.
Their poverty is also largely linked to their social status. Because of their low caste social position, usually they are not welcome by dominant caste people of the village to have free access to common property resources of the village such as village water bodies, pond, forest, common pasture, grazing land, cremation ground and all other such common land. They remain under the hegemonic control of a dominant few in the name of caste and ethnicity.
The practices of untouchability and caste-based social restrictions have been seriously affecting their economic activities in the villages. The Government shies away from intervening in such affairs in spite of laws and constitutional provisions.
Land and credit are two basic inputs and must be available to any landless poor household to make a dignified production unit and the unit must be economically viable for the family to make a decent income out of it. In that context, the present scheme of the State Government for agriculture labourers is no way helpful in raising their income or generating employment for them to change their present distress condition. It is desirable that the State Government make efforts to democratize the resources such as land, education and finance capital available through budget of the Government and provide banking facilities to all its people with affirmative action policy for the marginalised section to ensure a decent living.
For centuries together, the natural resources and financial resources available in the villages are under the hegemonic possession of the dominant caste people. This unequal access to public resources remain as before and even in so called Government schemes the landless poor are offered the less than the rich.
Ideally the poor should be offered more out of the State fund but almost all the Government schemes are being designed to offer less to the poor and more to the rich. This kind of scheme based intervention of the Government continues to further perpetuate inequality and distress among the poorest of the poor and most marginalised section of the State.