Farmers’ initiative

It has been the case for the most part that India of the villages seems to have been left behind even as urban Indians embraced economic liberalisation and reaped its benefits.

Rural India has slipped into debt and distress while urban India is all about glitzy malls and tower blocks.

Farmers are committing suicide in some parts, in others, like West Bengal, small landowners are worried their holdings will be gobbled up by big industries, leaving them with nothing.

But should that always be the case? Not necessarily. There are examples where this has not happened; maybe these are too few compared to the total context but which still show a way out of the cloistered and claustrophobic world of village India.. 

The entrepreneurial efforts and imagination of the farmers in villages around Pune, who have formed companies and given a new twist to the ambiguous connotation of FDI (foreign direct investment) by turning it into farmers’ direct investment, are indeed exciting and the rest of the country should be celebrating their initiative.

Here, local farmers have given their land to the new co-operative and turned into shareholders in a company that will make productive use of their lands.

Tech-parks, residential colonies, and townships will come up which will be sold for a profit. 

It sounds a little too good to be true, but it is true. It does a show a way for rural India to cope with the challenge of change. For one thing, it suggests empowerment — farmers becoming masters of their own destiny.

For another, this may be the way to maximise the value of the land and offer an opportunity to those who may not want to continue as farmers.  The Pune model may not work for all, because the initial conditions are different.

These villages are just a stone’s throw away from a well-developed urban centre. The value of their lands had increased exponentially because of the urban sprawl creeping into the rural neighbourhood.

But what stops farmers from forming an agricultural cooperative, for instance?  What farmers in other areas can learn from their Maharashtrian counterparts is to catch fortune by its forelock as it were.

They will have to learn to think of collective enterprise. Maharashtra has an old tradition of cooperative ventures, but there is no reason why farmers in West Bengal or other parts of India cannot follow this idea. 

For this, we — and that includes both farmers and politicians — need to give up outdated notions of what land stands for. Wasting fertile land should be avoided, but newer farming techniques will ensure that productivity does not fall.

The idea should be to give the landowner the maximum returns on the land and also a livelihood with dignity. Such cooperatives can offer a way.