Rahul, no great champion of farmers

India’s farming sector desperately need a champion, one who articulates the concerns of not just the creamy layer, but small and marginal cultivators as well. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi seeks to wear that mantle, but so far, it doesn’t look like a good fit.

In his newly-discovered interest in farm economics, he headed towards Punjab, once an agricultural utopia of rippling fields and tractor-mounted, turban-surmounted uber-farmers, now known for another innovation – suicide by pesticide. Did Rahul, while touting the Green Revolution in Parliament, grasp its social costs: crippling debt, poisoning of water, a cancer epidemic and land degradation? Did he take note of rotting potatoes heaped on roadsides by farmers, who didn’t find it worth the cost of taking them to the mandi? 

He then went to Vidarbha, a suicide zone populated by cotton farmers, who embraced Bt Cotton only to suffer crippling input costs and low returns. Did he understand the hazards of exposing farmers to high-cost -- and high-risk -- technologies and capricious global markets, without a safety net? Will he now move past the easy pickings of the Land Bill and take a long, hard look at the hopelessly warped and weighted-against-the-farmer farm economy of India? 

The last one year has been a terrible one for farmers, underlined by the rash of farmers’ suicides across the country. Partly as a result of Mother Nature’s vagaries and global factors but also of well-intentioned but mistimed and poorly-executed attempts at agricultural reform by the NDA government. It would have been nice to hear Rahul talk about them instead of resorting to high-pitched demagoguery.

Like the crash in the prices of cotton and paddy, resulting in depressed farm incomes. Later, overproduction of potato and sugarcane floored the price of both commodities and drove arrears (owed by sugar mills) to cane farmers to a record Rs15,000 crore.

Gandhi proclaimed that the UPA government had more than doubled the minimum support price (MSP) for farm produce during its tenure. While this is true, he ignored the fact that it also upped farm input costs – labour, fertiliser, seed -- by more than double, squeezing farm incomes even further. Nor did he mention the no-bonus-on-MSP policy with which the NDA inaugurated its government, compounded by a decision to restrict government procurement of farm produce.

Farm incomes fell across a large swathe of India. In Madhya Pradesh, for example, wheat farmers who had received Rs1,550 per quintal (MSP of Rs1,400 + bonus of Rs150) got only Rs1,450 (enhanced MSP) or Rs100 less per quintal. That is, if their grain was acquired. Thanks to the new policy, transactions at the 2,300-odd procurement centres in the state have fallen significantly.

Encouraging farmers to sell grain on the open market rather than rely on government procurement at a time of surplus is good, but not when market prices fall below the MSP. The spectacular growth of agriculture in Madhya Pradesh has been largely an outcome of the incentives offered to farmers by the state government, which was ready to procure all the wheat offered by farmers at the bonus price. This practice has now been stopped. To add insult to injury, while citing an excess of buffer stocks, the government imported 80,000 tonnes of wheat from Australia!

So frustrated was the RSS frontal organisation, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, with the opposition’s failure to take up the no-bonus/low procurement issue, that it actually presented a note to the Congress’ MP unit on the subject!

Gandhi did mention the shortage of urea. The government’s failure to ensure timely import of urea resulted in black marketeering across the country, on a scale never seen before. Angry farmers raided urea trucks and resorted to rail rokos. In Haryana, urea bags were distributed through the police stations to prevent rioting. So far, there is no explanation of why the government failed to ensure timely imports.

As Gandhi haggled over the extent of crop loss due to rain and hailstorms, it was left to MP CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan to raise the problem of lack of proper insurance cover for farmers. Insurance companies set absurd standards for paying insurance and the farmer ends up with nothing. In the same way, when the government steps in to compensate farmers for crop loss, it goes by standards set and implemented by the bureaucracy, so that sometimes deserving farmers get nothing. That was the tragedy of Gajendra Singh, a wheat farmer who was judged undeserving of compensation by the administration of Bandikui, Rajasthan.

“In our time, in UPA government's time, agriculture credit grew by 700 percent. It went up to Rs8 lakh crore and 6.5 crore farmers benefited from this”, declared Congress vice-president. However, he would have done well to mention studies which have clearly shown that the bulk of agricultural credit, disbursed in the name of farmers, is actually swallowed up by agencies which manufacture and sell agricultural inputs. This leaves the farmers at the mercy of moneylenders.
 
Farm distress was compounded in the last one year by the decline in UPA I’s flagship programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Small and marginal farmers have come to depend on NREGA to supplement their income. But new projects are not being undertaken under NREGA due to limited disbursements from the centre. The number of work days have gone down across the country.

Now we segue to Gandhi’s main plank -- the amendment of the Land Acquisition Act of 2013. Back in July, 2014, when Union minister Nitin Gadkari called a meeting of state revenue ministers to discuss the amendments, he met with a resounding Jai Ho from Congress representatives. Surely, that would have been a good time to say, “You can’t deprive farmers of the right to say “no” to land acquisition and deny them a say in the development of their areas. We stick with the consent and the social impact assessment clauses.” Perhaps the Ordinance and the subsequent hullaballoo could have been avoided if the Congress had not given the impression that it would back the proposed amendments. By the time Gandhi took up the issue, RSS frontal organisations – BKS, Swadeshi Jagran Manch, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh and the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram -- had already voiced their opposition.

The Congress, having been a promoter of genetically modified crops, is naturally found wanting when it comes to opposing trials of GM seeds and India being touted as a GM destination. That, too, has been left to the RSS, which opposes GM crops on the grounds that they threaten seed sovereignty with no tangible benefits and possible adverse impact of environment and health.

Yes, farmers are in acute distress. Yes, the NDA government hasn’t been farmer-friendly. But Rahul Gandhi, known for his spasmodic interest in causes and tendency to wake up after the horse has bolted, doesn’t inspire confidence. We need him to speak up, to offer solutions for the farm sector’s most pressing concerns: fragmented holdings, skewed farm credit, distorted markets, lack of income support and insurance cover, spiralling input costs and misdirected subsidies.

The author is a senior journalist based in New Delhi