P Sainath
People's Democracy (Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)
Vol. XXXVII
No. 29
July 21, 2013
(P Sainath, Rural affairs editor of The Hindu newspaper, delivered
special address in the seminars conducted by the Tamilnadu Vivasayikal
Sangam, as a prelude to the 33rd conference of the All India Kishan
Sabha during July 24-27, 2013 at Cuddalore. He spoke in as many as four
centres - Tirunelveli, Kovilpatti, Erode and Tirupur. He extensively
dealt with the agrarian crisis. The gist of the various points he
presented in all the four seminars is given below, which has been
compiled by M Girija)
LATER this month, the all India
conference of AIKS is going to take place for four days in Cuddalore. In
these four days, 188 Indian farmers will be committing suicide; more
than 2000 will be attempting at suicide (because for every successful
suicide, according to the police there are about 12 attempts); more than
8000 farmers will be quitting agriculture or will be loosing the status
of a farmer; many will be becoming agricultural labourers. However,
during the same four days, the central government alone will be writing
off almost Rs 5500 crore in tax relief -- in Corporate Income Tax,
Import Duties and Excise Duties -- for the richest 1 per cent of Indian
society. In the last union budget presented in March 2013, they wrote
off a staggering Rs 5,33,000 crore! The biggest capitalists and the
largest companies in this country are getting tens of thousands of
crores in tax relief. The 'Statement of Revenue Forgone' which is an
annexure to the Budget gives this figure and it is several thousand
crores of rupees bigger than the budget deficit. So, there will be no
crisis if these rich are made to pay their taxes due. Also one of the
biggest concessions in import duty, in the current budget, is for gold
imports i.e., Rs 60,000 crore. In the last three years more than Rs
1,50,000 crore has been waived in import duties on gold, diamond and
jewellery. Now, they are pleading for stoppage of gold imports due to
current account deficit crisis. But it is they who encouraged these
imports since 2006 by waiving off more than Rs 3 lakh crore in import
duties on this count.
THE
‘WHITE GOLD’
Gold has
another measurement in the life of farmers. If we are able to comprehend
the crisis-hit cotton growing Vidharbha area, we can understand this
measurement. Let us compare the status of cotton growing farmers there
in the 60s and 70s and now. They were actually prosperous and were
sending their children to private medical colleges in Mumbai. In those
days, cotton was called white gold because the price that the farmer got
for cotton was better than that of gold. As late as 1974, the price a
farmer received for one quintal of cotton was greater than the cost of
10 gms of gold. But today, to buy those 10 gms of gold, he has to sell 6
to 7 quintals of cotton. Last year he had to sell 10 quintals when the
price of gold went above Rs 30,000 for 10 gms. So, this gives a picture
of how the farmer's lives changed over this period. And now with the
latest decision of the central government to double the prices of
natural gas, the farmers are going to be hit very badly, because it will
lead to a huge increase in electricity cost and a gigantic increase in
fertiliser cost. This is the kind of situation in which the AIKS
conference is going to meet.
The first element of the
agrarian crisis is the collapse of investment in agriculture. If you
take agriculture and the allied activities, in the last budget of V P
Singh in 1989, allocations to agriculture, irrigation and allied
activities came to around 14 per cent of GDP. By 2004, it was less than
6 per cent and that is why in 2004, all the incumbent governments in
major states were defeated by the farmers, for example S M Krishna in
Karnataka and Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh. It was the farming
vote that threw these people out of power because of the damage they had
done to the farmers. Therefore, the farmers should know their
strength. They are not weak and they are not alone; they are capable of
taking on these governments.
WHO IS
A FARMER?
Another little fallacy that people do not often realise is that there
are far fewer farmers in the country than it is normally assumed. We
have great neo-liberal economists Jagadish Bhagavathi, Aravind Managreya
writing that 53 per cent of Indians are farmers. It shows that these
great economists do not know who is a farmer in this country. Over 50
per cent of the population is connected to agriculture. Being connected
to agriculture is not the same thing as being a farmer. Everybody in
the film industry is not an actor; everybody in the education industry
is not a student. And everybody in agriculture is not a farmer. In the
Census, you have a definition of who is a cultivator. There are
several categories of cultivators. One is main cultivator, i.e.,
somebody who does agriculture for at least 183 days in a year. That
person is considered to be entirely dependent on agriculture as the main
source of occupation, livelihood and income and he is called the main
cultivator. Then there is marginal cultivator, i.e., those who do three
to six months of agricultural work in a year, and even if it may be one
to three months of entirely casual work. Then there are agricultural
labourers who can further be classified as main workers and marginal
workers. But if we take who the Census considers to be a real or main
cultivator, it is less than 8 per cent of the Indian population. If we
add marginal cultivators, it comes to 9.9 per cent and if we add the
agricultural labourers, then it comes to 23 per cent of the population.
And this number of farmers is shrinking dramatically. Between 2001
census and 2011 census, 7.7 million people have stopped being farmers or
they lost the status of main cultivator. How do we know that they lost
the status of main cultivator? Because as the number of farmers is
going down in the census, the number of agricultural labourers is going
up. In Andhra Pradesh, a large number of the farmers have lost control
of their land, lives and they are no longer able to do 183 days of
agriculture and they have been forced to become agricultural labourers.
If we look back at the 60s, 70s and even 80s, the number of farmers
rose very dramatically. However, in the 1991 to 2011 census, farmers
declined by 7.2 million, which means that in the 20 years of economic
reforms, this country has lost 15 millions of people classified as
farmers. It also means that on an average we are losing 2000 farmers
per day. If you take just the last 10 years, the number works out to
2035 per day. According to the Planning Commission figures, 14 million
jobs were lost in agricultural sector during 2005 to 2010. So, to say 50
per cent of the our population is farmers is not correct. But it is
correct to say that around 50 to 60 per cent of population are dependent
on or connected to agriculture. This is the picture of the farmers.
IN THE HANDS
OF CORPORATES
So, let us try to put in one sentence about agrarian crisis. The
crisis is that the Indian ruling classes have decided to take
agriculture out of the hands of small farmers and hand it over to the
biggest corporates in the country. For instance, you can see who all
have registered themselves as farmers in Maharashtra. The laws have been
changed so that the credit in agriculture, rural credit or agricultural
credit is now going to the biggest companies in the country. In
Maharashtra, in the year 2010, an analysis of agricultural credit by an
officer of Reserve Bank of India shows that 53 per cent of agricultural
credit in the state has been disbursed in Mumbai Metro branches of banks
whereas in the entire rural Maharashtra, only 38 per cent of the loans
were disbursed by the rural branches of the banks.
Where are
the farmers in the city of Mumbai? Mukesh Ambani and Amitabh Bachchan
are the farmers there. These are the new farmers. Another fact, not just
Maharashtra but all over the country, throughout the 90s, the
government has closed down rural bank branches. In 1993, 60 per cent of
the branches of the banks in the country, including all commercial
banks, scheduled banks, rural banks, etc, were in the countryside. By
2008, it came down to less than 48 per cent. Because of the kind of
crisis it produced, in 2009-10 they have been trying to open up few
branches and they are starting the system of banking business
correspondent, who is becoming the new money lender. Each time he has
to give a loan or approve the loan, he takes money from the farmer and
there is a set rate for this.
It may be surprising that, in
fact, the amount of agricultural credit has gone up very significantly.
But it is not the small farmer who is getting it. Many things are
included in the scheme of agricultural credit and justified. Some might
appear simply funny. In 2010, the town of Aurangabad entered Guinness
Book of Records, Limca Book of Records when a small group of businessmen
bought 150 Mercedes Benz cars at one shot to show what a great city
theirs is. The cost of 150 Mercedes Benz cars is Rs 66 crore. Out of
this, Rs 44 crore came from public sector bank, SBI, at 7 per cent
interest rate. I asked the same branch of SBI, if I am a farmer and
buying a tractor, what will be the rate of interest. The reply was 14
per cent. So, 7 per cent for luxury Mercedes Benz car and 14 per cent
for a productive tractor. That captures the hostility of the Indian
State towards the small farmers. This tells you the kind of
discrimination that is going on. Under the new way that they define the
agricultural credit, if Mukesh Ambani opens a cold storage in Anna
Salai, Chennai, he will get credit at 4 per cent, because cold storage
is to keep the vegetables and it is agriculture. The farmer who grows
those vegetables is committing suicide as there is no credit for him.
But they have defined agricultural credit and in every budget, they have
expanded the meaning of this word. So, there is a huge credit squeeze
on the farmers. All over the country, in many districts that I visit,
people are telling me that banks have declared very low interest rates
but are not giving loans to us.
Nationally till 2010,
according to the study by Prof Ramakumar of Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, the loans that are decreasing very fast are the category of
loans ranging from Rs 50,000 to Rs 2 lakh which is taken by smaller
farmers. These have reduced to 50 per cent between 2000 and 2008. At
the same time, the loans in agriculture that have gone up and doubled
are the loans above Rs 10 crore. Such loans are going not to the
farmers but to the corporates. It is going into the manufacture of
agricultural machinery. All sorts of write-offs are being given to the
corporate sector. The government of India, along with FICCI, is mooting
a scheme called "Million Farmer Initiative" and the budget allocation
for this scheme is Rs 7000 crore, with Rs 3000 crore being subsidies
from the government of India. In Tamilnadu, ITC which has its
headquarters in Kolkata, is going to implement this new initiative.
Under this, the MBA graduates and executives of ITC are going to teach
our farmers how to grow ragi, chilli, cumin seeds and tobacco. This
clearly shows the intention of the government to drive the Indian
agricultural sector towards corporate farming.
Essentially the
agrarian crisis is the shift of Indian State in moving millions of
people away from agriculture and handing over agriculture to the
corporate sector. That is the heart and soul of the agrarian crisis in
the country.
INDEBTEDNESS
AND SUICIDES
At the same
time, the government is for a market-based pricing policy. This is an
arbitrary thing like they have acted recently in their attempt to double
the gas price. It has no basis in market or in the Indian production
system. They raise prices for all the inputs of agriculture. In the
last 15 years, fertilizer cost has gone up tremendously. If we look at
the price of Di-Ammonium Posphate (DAP), the price of one bag of DAP in
1991 was Rs 180; in 2011 it had reached Rs 534, and now in Tamilnadu it
is Rs 1250. Water is being privatised throughout the country. So the
cost of cultivation has gone up by five times but the income of farmer
has not gone up by 5 times and the people are forced to drop out of
agriculture. They have gone bankrupt as there is no credit available
from institutions. They have turned to the money lender and thus their
debt has grown manifold. Most of the suicides by the farmers are linked
to such indebtedness. I have visited 850 households where there have
been suicides and in every case, there was a huge debt - not only debt
on agriculture, but also debt on health, education expenditure. Today
in rural India, health expenditure is the second largest component of
the family debt. The combination of debt, indebtedness, lack of credit,
collapse of agriculture, and cost of agriculture – all drove the
farmers to commit suicide.
As per the data published in the
end of June, 2013 by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) during the
period of 18 years from 1995 to 2013, the number of Indian farmers who
committed suicide is 2,84,694. This number, however, does not include
the tens of thousands of women farmers who committed suicide. The police
and the government of India don’t count the women as women farmers, but
count them as farmer’s wife. So, in the official statistics we could
see only 8 to 10 per cent of women farmers’ suicide, which is not true.
Similarly, the official figure excludes the SC/ST farmers. Very often
the police say that the patta is not clear. Even after deducting the
number of women farmers, SC/ST farmers, the suicide figures touch
2,84,694. It means, in the last 9 years, one farmer on an average kills
himself in every 32 minutes in this country. Suicides are not the
crisis, but the consequences of the crisis; not the origin of crisis but
the outcome of the crisis. Thus, the neo-liberal policies of the
rulers - credit squeeze, escalation in cultivation cost, etc. – are
precisely starving investment in agricultural sector. This is done with
the intention of transferring agriculture from the small farmers to the
big corporates. By the way, they have taken over lakhs and lakhs of
land from the farmers. Recently, in the struggle against POSCO, the
fields where betal leaves were being grown got shifted to mining. The
census data and the National Sample Survey show us that huge migrations
have occurred as millions of people have left the villages and this has
created additional complications. Men, even when they remain in the
countryside, have moved out of agriculture. This increases pressure on
women farmer tremendously. They, who were earlier spending time in
looking after the livestock, have now become agricultural labourers.
Therefore, you can see the rise in the number of women agricultural
labourers. Since 1997, there is an absolute decline in the number of
cattle and goats, because women who were looking after them earlier,
have now switched over to other works. But these women are now doing 10
times more work.
POSSIBLE
SOLUTIONS
In such a
situation, we have to fight for implementation of the main
recommendations of the National Commission of Farmers. In 2004, because
of the large number of farmer suicides, the government of India set up
this Commission headed by Professor M S Swaminathan. In 2007, he
submitted four volumes of report to the then minister for agriculture,
Sharad Pawar. They contain many progressive recommendations. Even after a
lapse of six years since then, there is no discussion in parliament on
this report! Our minister has not tabled it on the floor of parliament
for discussion even for a minute. However, they had time to discuss
whether the benefits of KG Basin should go to Anil Ambani or Mukesh
Ambani, though it belongs to the people of Andhra Pradesh. One of the
recommendations is cost of production plus 50 per cent should be the
price what a farmer should get. The report also speaks of ‘low interest
loans’, and in drought hit areas ‘no interest loans’. The MPs belonging
to the Left parties have demanded a special session on agriculture to
discuss this report. Though Sharad Pawar agreed to it, it is not to be
so far. In fact, Sharad Pawar has never again spoken to Professor M S
Swaminathan. Perhaps, he is angry with him for not giving the report as
Pawar wanted it to be – that is entirely in favour of corporate
agriculture. Therefore, we should fight for the implementation of the
recommendations of the National Commission of Farmers that deals with
the agrarian crisis in the country between 2004 and 2007.
We
should demand a special session of parliament just to discuss the
agrarian crisis and nothing else. We should also demand that agriculture
in India be declared a public service. People in agriculture are in
the lowest income sector. One of the recommendations of the Commission
says, “Don’t count agricultural growth only in terms of output of
products, but calculate it on the basis of income of the farmers”.
Apart from these, we should also look at two other issues - research in
social sector issues, and policy on economic issues. In the social
sector, we need to focus on research. Today, the public Agricultural
Universities and Indian Council of Agricultural Research remain sold
out, and they are entirely working for MNCs like Monsanto, Cargill and
others. The universities and ICAR are not working for the farmers.
Everyday they insist that this is the best thing and this is the best
seed in the world etc. Our farmers are being cheated by them. Hence,
the All India Kisan Sabha at the national level, state level and if
possible at the district level, start advanced research cells in
agriculture, at least in a small way. It may be one or two acres of
experimental plots. Because, today we need to study what is happening
to the fertility of soil in each district. Soil erosion has been so
great. The loss of fertility is 20 to 25 per cent in different parts of
the country and this is because sometimes we grow wrong crops or some
times we use too much chemicals and pesticides. Therefore, the AIKS
should focus on this aspect and find out which is the most beneficial
crop to the farmer of the particular area. Farmers’ Unions in many
countries are participating in research. We need to have a re-look at
the usage of water. We also should think about community supported
agriculture. Just imagine, 50 families residing in an area can make an
agreement with the local group of farmers about all their farm needs. In
such situation, the farmer groups in the area can know in advance what
and how much to grow.
When we look at the political and
economic issues aspects, we have to challenge the neo-liberal regime.
We have to force them to take back the policies of the last 20 years.
We have to restore the credit situation which is due to Indian farmers
and that has to be done by mass struggle. If we look at the history of
the country, we can see that it was the peasantry of the country, and
not the urban leaders and lawyers alone, who brought down the British
Empire. In 1857, in the first war of independence, the role of peasants
could be seen. In 1948, peasants of Telengana led by the Communists
fought against the Nizam, defeated him, captured 10 lakh acres of land
and distributed them among the landless. In the 50s, Kerala saw the
land reforms. In the 70s and 80s, we have West Bengal land reforms.
Still, there are many more tasks that remain unfinished.
In
India, the period of 50s, 60s and 70s saw mass movements of farmers.
But, 90s and 2000s saw mass suicides of farmers. This is not a solution
but a surrender. Therefore, let us go back to the 50s, 60s and 70s and
start confronting the policies, fight for the rights to see that
agriculture stays in the hands of the farmers, and not get shifted to
the hands of corporates. Let us fight against corporate takeover of
Indian agriculture. Looking at the history of the Indian farmers,
please conclude that you can do and you can win. When the farmers of
the country step out and confront the corporates, it will be a bitter
and horrible struggle. Ultimately, farmers are bound to succeed.
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