Farm prescription: You can't treat a broken bone with painkillers

If a bone is broken, it pains. A painkiller reduces the pain momentarily, but cannot fix the bone. While even an illiterate farmer understands this, the political class continues to remain cosy in its mindset that throwing money at a problem actually solves it. For rural India now, the money ‘thrown’ is in the form of farm loan waivers.

Not being able to repay their loans is not why farmers are dying in Maharashtra or Madhya Pradesh. What’s killing them is hopelessness, a fear that the future can be worse than the present. When the Union Finance Minister tells state governments – he may have fiscally-prudent reasons to do so – that the Centre won’t foot the bill of loan waivers and/or any cash injection that is being administered, then that ‘future’ looks even more bleak.
 

This announcement, which could have very well been in the form of an internal communication to concerned chief ministers, just sucked ‘hope’ out of the system – at a time when it was needed most in the agricultural sector.
 

Tweeting on the subject on Tuesday evening, Rajya Sabha MP and Essel Group chairman Dr Subhash Chandra said: “Loan waiver is not a solution. Every government should remove corruption in their irrigation & agriculture departments.” He added: “All state governments should work towards increasing the farmers' income, which is possible.”

Loan waiver is not a solution. Every government should remove corruption in their irrigation & agriculture departments — Dr. Subhash Chandra (@subhashchandra) June 13, 2017

All state governments should work towards increasing the farmers' income, which is possible.

— Dr. Subhash Chandra (@subhashchandra) June 13, 2017

We, as a country, do not believe in permanent solutions. The reason: It involves decision-making, hard work, and a vision that extends beyond the next election. Waiving loans and cash transfers are populist solutions, but they can never mend the broken bone.

The agricultural sector needs long-term reforms that perhaps only the Narendra Modi government, with its solid majority in Lok Sabha and control over states, can provide. Land-holding patterns and fragmentation of farm space, sinking of rural lending, food prices, rural electrification and connectivity, setting a floor price for agri-produce, the supply chain of seeds, fertiliser & machinery – are issues that the Modi government must address, and address now. Just making a policy framework and shifting the onus of implementation to states is fraught with risks – even political risks for this all-powerful NDA government.
 

It is time the Prime Minister addresses the farmers’ issue directly, rather than have a chief minister come up with a short-sighted ‘piece-to-camera’. In a theatre of the absurd, Shivraj Singh Chouhan of Madhya Pradesh reacting to the killing of farmers in his state by doing an ‘Arvind Kejriwal’ – sitting on an indefinite fast. A cruel joke on hungry farmers (they needed feeding, not displays of fasting)! Devendra Fadnavis of Maharashtra did not fast, but has taken an economic path that can cripple his state’s finances for years.
 

‘States make the Nation’ is the tagline of a national channel that belongs to the Zee media group. It is very true. And just as states make our nation, unrest in states creates unrest in the nation too. It is  time for the Prime Minister to step into the operating theatre and fix that broken bone.

The author is Editor-in-Chief of DNA