A few days back, an article got featured in "The Hindu" about the agrarian crisis in Vidarbha. The article was about Prime Minister's visit to Vidarbha last year where he announced relief packages for heavily indebted farmers. This resulted in farmers breathing a sigh of relief which unfortunately didn't stay for a long time. Suicides toll rose from 2,425 in 2005 to 2,832 in 2006.
And after 1 full year when PM arrived in Mumbai to review the situation, he was greeted with success stories. We should appreciate the Government's work as they are mentioning that only 836 suicides cases of "eligible" are being registered. If a whole family commits suicide, the suicide count would be increased by 1, no matter how many dependents were there in that family. If a farm was registered over a person's name during ancient times, and now if descendant of that person who is farming the land commits suicide would not be considered as a "genuine" suicide. In a district in Vidarbha, there were 30 suicides in July this year but not a single one was "genuine".
We cannot pinpoint the blame on one single individual or organization for the crisis. Leaving the protagonists apart, which include indebtedness, no monsoon, social evils, etc, an important role was played by lack of implementation of tons of planned/unplanned strategies.
The situation started aggravating in 2004 when the State Government cut down the prices of cotton by Rs 500 per 100 Kg which resulted in nothing but a huge increase in the no. of suicides.
I am ending this by a few suggestions which could upturn the crisis. The Govt should take some action to reduce the debt of the farmers, if can not make it zero, so that they would at least get relieved from the distressful present situation. Secondly, proper allocation of resources which includes distribution of money from relief packages, irrigation water, electricity, etc. Thirdly, proper implementable planning should be done to avoid such situations in future.
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3 comments:
Interesting comments - and since this is a blog on infrastructure, how do you think better infrastructure can help improve this situation?
As the issue is very serious, proper decisions should be taken by experts. But in my view following steps could be useful:
Proper irrigation system should be provided as one of reasons for negligible income of farmers is low productivity because of absence of good rains in previous years.
A good market should be provided to the farmers where they can get appropriate prices for their crop. It includes good roads connecting small villages to nearby medium level cities.
Although these are general ideas and had been planned by government but are not properly implemented.
Well here is something which struck me.We had small scale textile industries which always had problems pertaining finance, dealers, primary and secondary markets. Then emerged large scale textile industries which had their own investors, markets and being a big company with allies in government they could get their things done. Similarly a company X can ask people to invest their land and so gathering numerous hectares of land to cultivate and sell and then the profits are proportionally shared among the investors .The advantages in this is that company X as it is big and influential can get things like irrigation projects for their cluster of lands approved which small farmers cannot do and there can be no issues of monsoon uncertainty or market dealers. There are issues over here like
1> transparency
2> why would a big company like reliance take this up which may be low profit and more risky a business.
A very raw idea, please comment to improvise.
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