Decrying the delay in publishing and implementing, a report of the Farmers’ Commission by the State Government, Janata Vikas Manch (JVM) on Wednesday demanded immediate implementation of the report.
“Farmers have been committing suicide for the past four years in the State. As per some independent reports, more than 250 farmers committed suicides due to various reasons. After a series of farmers’ suicides, the State Government had constituted a farmers’ commission in early 2010. The commission took three extensions of six months each and submitted its report at the end of 2012. In spite of the submission of the final report, the Government is still sitting on it for the past ten months. It is yet to make the 330-page report public,” said Sai Prasan of JVM.
It is a matter of a great concern that none of the political parties, farmers’ organisations, academicians and civil society organisations are questioning the Government about the report on the farmers though the Government had spent more than Rs 50 lakh on the panel, rued Prasan, who, however, claimed that the JVM had possessed a copy of the final report.
Prasan said the report did not identify the reasons for the continuous suicides of the farmers since mid-2008 in the State. The report said, “The tendency of loan delinquency amongst a section of farmers is affecting the environment of credit discipline which results in restrictive practices on the part of the banks on the one hand and excessive debt over-burden on the other. The delinquency arising out of general natural disasters or individual problems has to be dealt within the framework of loan conversion and loan reschedulement by the banks with due incentives provided by the State Government.”
The report stated that the willful defaulters had to be dealt with firmly both by the banks and the State Government so that the environment was not vitiated to the detriment of other farmers who were regular in their transactions with the banks. According to the JVM, the report did not mention that the farmers were taking loans from the micro-finance companies due to the weak banking network. The interest rates of these MFIs and private lenders were very high compared to bank loans pushing the State farmers to commit suicide, it said. The report too did not suggest the ways to expand the banking network and how to deliver bank loans to the farmers at a lower rate, besides it did not give details on the strengthening of infrastructure in the agriculture sector.
‘Another major reason for the backwardness of the agriculture sector is the absence of the cold storage due to the lack of electricity. The report did not address this problem also,” said Prasan. Devi Prasad Tripathy of JVM alleged that the report also missed points like how the Government would tackle the natural calamities like cyclone, flood and drought in the agriculture sector.
“We demanded that the State Government should immediately implement the recommendations of the panel’s final report and look into various areas where it could not address the problems of the farmers,” urged Prasan.