DNA Edit: Farmer-friendly

With elections lined up in four major states, state governments are pressing the pedal to the floor in addressing issues of agriculture and rural distress. The Union Budget set the tone for the year with many promises aimed at pleasing the farmer.

The Budget dared boldly go where very few budgets in the past have dared to venture: It raised the MSP by 50 per cent on kharif crops. This is most welcome, although greater questions on where will the government find the funds to finance a deeply penetrating scheme like this is moot. Adding more burden to the exchequer’s coffer is the path-breaking Modicare scheme.

The government will be hard-pressed in living up to its promises on both the plans. A failure to deliver on these fronts will extract electoral costs from the government in a year that is likely to aggressively contested polls.

Perhaps, the success of BJP in the four state elections — Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh — will lay the groundwork for 2019. Since 2014, BJP’s performance in state elections shows that the party has been trumping its opponents, either through its honed messaging or by getting the better of its opponents (as it did in Goa and Manipur).

However, securing power in these four states will be no pushover for the BJP. In Rajasthan as well as Madhya Pradesh, the state Chief Ministers are staring at the prospects of anti-incumbency. In MP, CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan will be going one-on-one with a fatigue factor that has settled in after his 12-year stint as the CM. Meanwhile, the state of agriculture in MP is turning parlous. 10 per cent of the farmer suicides that took place in MP in the first 16 years of this century took place between February 2016 and 2017- a telling commentary on the helplessness and the seething anger of the MP peasant.

In July last year, the MP government tasted the full force of their wrath when five farmers died in police fire during a demonstration demanding hiking of remunerative prices. As a salve, the CM announced a Rs 1,000 crore stabilisation fund but how efficacious has the fund been will be seen once the state goes to polls.

Apart from the stabilisation fund, he has also made promises of bringing back a bonus paid over and above the MSP and waiving the interest on their loans. In Rajasthan, CM Vasundhara Raje has announced a one-time loan waiver of up to Rs 50,000 for small and marginal farmers, who have borrowed from co-operative banks.

She has also unveiled her plans to put in place a debt relief commission where a farmer will be able to secure relief after presenting their case to the commission. Additionally, land revenue has been exempted for at least 40 lakh farmers.

The Rajasthan CM is hoping that by extending these sops, she would be able to overcome the anti-incumbency factor which has facilitated a passage of power from BJP to Congress alternatively since 1993. Eventually, though, politics will end up taxing the economics of the states. To ensure that these schemes reach the lowest common denominator, the state of MP needs close to Rs 10,000 crore on the whole and Rs 5,000 crore in the next two months.

In Rajasthan, the loan waiver alone would cost Rs 8,000 crore to the exchequer.