To save Bharat, give farmers a better deal

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Saturday meeting with the chief ministers of drought-hit states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh, didn’t yield much that was new. There was emphasis as usual on increasing irrigation, conserving water and digging borewells, but the focus on irrigation is misplaced in a nation where 60 per cent of land is rain-fed and little attention is paid to the needs of farmers in these areas. Irrigation won’t help when the water table is falling dangerously. The government should concentrate on encouraging crops that need little water like sorghum (jowar), once Maharashtra’s staple, and soya, pulses and oilseeds, that are being imported; not water-guzzlers like rice, wheat and cotton. But these are grown as they get higher minimum support prices. The shift in cropping pattern can be done by giving farmers remunerative prices for these crops. If we had a real agricultural policy this would be automatically taken care of, but then no government has had one; and even the drought-handling measures just discussed will be forgotten as soon as the first rains come.

For starters, the government must protect farmers’ earnings. As we have noted many times in these columns, farmers have been urged to grow pulses and oilseeds, but when there is a surplus in these crops the prices go down immediately, even below support prices. No one comes to the farmers’ rescue then, so how can they improve their earnings? There is a lot of hope now resting on a good monsoon. There will be a good crop and prices will fall, which is good for the consumer and will keep inflation down. But what about farmers? His earnings will fall and so will his wages.

The Seventh Pay Commission has, for instance, suggested a minimum wage of Rs 18,000 for a peon, and as Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself told a BJP meet recently, people are prepared to pay Rs 15 lakh as bribe for a peon’s job. One wonders though why no minimum wage has been set under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. In Jharkhand recently, the minimum wage under NREGA was increased by Rs 5 and made Rs 165. The labourers reportedly returned this Rs 5 in envelopes to the PM to register their protest. This only goes to show that the urban-rural divide continues unabated, with a heavy bias against rural India, or Bharat.

Dr M.S. Swaminathan, the widely-respected agricultural scientist, has repeatedly said it is necessary to focus on increasing the earnings of farmers rather than on growth in agriculture alone. It’s still not too late for the government to give protection to farmers’ incomes. The real test will come, however, in March next year when the new crop arrives.