Indian Farmers’ Crisis: Bharat Bandh Tomorrow!
Nobody would deny
the fact that reforms are urgently needed in the agricultural sector with the
Agriculture Produce Market Committees (APMC) becoming obsolete and a growing
burden for both the farmers and the government, and the continuing exploitation
of the farmers by the APMC-centric middlemen and of course, the money lenders
nobody is talking about whom, but it has been a fact of life that the stranglehold
of the moneylenders drives scores of small and marginal farmers to suicides
every year.
Except for the
states of Punjab and Haryana the APMCs do not play a significant role in many
other states where the state governments had either dismantled these or allowed
the farmers the option to sell to the private traders too. So, it is not surprising
that only 6% of Indian farmers actually sell through the APMCs or that only 25%
of the total farming transactions are done in APMCs. Further, the system of Minimum
Support Price (MSP) is applicable to only 23 commodities, and this system is
largely responsible for overproduction in food grains leading to tremendous wastage
in the warehouses, and also it cannot stop the mechanism of distress selling by
farmers during hard times. Most of the states had already delinked the sale of
vegetables and fruits from the APMC mandis long back.
So yes. Reforms are
indeed needed. The earlier governments also wanted to either change or abolish
the APMCs. But the almost covert, majority-based and rushed way the government
of India pushed the Farm Laws and passed these in Parliament could hardly be
justified, and in fact, this high-handedness had led to the creation of fears,
uncertainty and unrest in the farmers across the country. In terms of policies
and reforms the Indian agricultural sector, still the bane of the economy, has
a legacy since the pre-independence period, and therefore, to have an ideal
system of farming with easy and profitable market access to the cultivators
free of the sucking middlemen and the traps of the money lenders, a chain of
storage facilities, appropriate mechanism to encourage commercial crops and so
on, one needs a long process of deliberations, brainstorming, constitution of
panel of experts, submission of reports etc. taking all political parties and
all stakeholders on board.
So,
it seems that the rushing through of the laws at this pandemic times was just a
means to help out the corporates to generate more funds/business for them in the
still-prospering agriculture sector which in turn can help the government
garner more revenues. And, instead of a well-thought-out process of deliberations
directly bringing in the corporates to deal in agricultural produce is bound to
create apprehension and doubts, genuine or unfounded.
It
has become a catch-22 situation as the impatient farmers cannot possibly agree
for nothing less than the scrapping of the laws and the government too cannot
possibly agree to a repeal since the laws were pushed through so urgently. However,
we can only hope that good practical sense would prevail over the rulers to
consider at least a stay on the implementation so that a proper mechanism sets
in to carry out the much-needed reforms. They should also desist from making allegations
of vested interests or even terrorists joining the farmers’ bandwagon to give a
bad name to the agitation, as has been their wont in recent years.
The farmers who are the annadatas (food providers) for all of us should not be allowed to suffer like this, and if they are made desperate only our country and economy would suffer even more. It is extremely critical to have all the farmers on board, rich or small or marginal, with meaningful laws suited to their issues, problems and concerns. All experts/intellectuals/politicians should shed their ideological bias and prejudice, and help the government resolve the crisis in overwhelming favour of our farmers.
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