Lockdown, Locust And Floods: India’s Farmers Are Suffering

Kakali Das

The lockdown has wreaked havoc on the harvest and the sowing period over the past few months, locust happened thereafter followed by the floods.

While the mainstream media has forgotten about the locust, they are still distinctly prevalent in parts of North India. Floods in Assam and Bihar are completely ruining the crops.

Farmers in Maharashtra have emptied their milk cans onto the streets as a sign of protest a couple of days ago. A lot of people on Twitter, sitting in the comfort of their homes, were screaming “Oh, why would they waste the milk, it should be given to the poor”. These people emptying the cans are poor.

The reason why they do this year after year is because it is the only way to grab the stubborn attention of the people in Urban India. Unless they do this, nobody cares. No farmer would ever in his/her right mind empty their crops or their produce on the roads, unless they were given no choice. They are doing this to grab the central attention.

The government has through the lockdown made some announcements for the ‘benefit’ of farmers. To remind the readers, the government has promised the people that no one would go hungry or starve in this country – the promise that has been flatly broken across the board.

The government in question had proclaimed that the payments via the PM Kisan Plan would be increased, that Fisheries and Animal Husbandry would be included in the plan, that one trillion rupees would be spent on agricultural infrastructure, alongside some movements in the Essential Commodities Act allowing farmers to become contract farming dealers and to sell their produce to whoever they needed to sell.

Has the lockdown driven our farmers further into debt?Are farmers receiving the minimum support that they were promised? Have the government’s policy changes actually helped the farmers in any way?

The farmers have always been in distress and on the receiving end of this unsparing system. They are committing suicide or are forced to commit suicide. The harvest that was produced before the pandemic wasn’t procured and with no any equitable announcement of the prices sans the procurement and the payment, the farmers are doomed to stalk the dark.

So far as the economic reports are concerned, rural economy is booming owing to the monsoon and the rainfall. It further stated,“Employment has increased in rural India, hence it can be assumed that rural India will be the backbone that lifts the country up in the near future”. Why are then conflicting reports coming in from across the board? It’s a deliberate mis-joining of issues.

Of course, because of the monsoon there has been an increase in plantation but the problem lies in the focus of governance and policy which is on the production and never the producer. Even if there is an increase in plantation it seldom makes a difference to the farmers, because with the additional amount of crops the farmer will still get half the penny worth of the crops as fixed in the end.

So those who are tomtoming the stories of rural India pushing up the economy, what they are actually insinuating is the production that rural India make will be exploited in order to ensure that food security of urban India is not impeded. That is a sub-text.

“The farmers are in debt because that is the policy”, Avik Saha, National Convenor, Jai Kisan Andolansaid.

If we recall the announcement of the Finance Minister of India, Mrs. Nirmala Sitharaman’s 20 lakh crore package, the bulk of it, so far as the rural India and farmers were concerned, was a debt. Thegovernment is firm in its belief that if the farmers, crop after crop, season after season are losing money by going below their margin, they will have to be given loans which will eventually lead to more debts of the farmers.

If a person who is incessantly losing money in his enterprise, about to go belly up and you constantly give loans to that personseason after season, the person is bound to be pushed to a pesticide bottle or a tree. This is a deliberate killing of farmers by policy – a premeditated plan it is.

Unfortunately, in India, for most of the media, the plight of the farmers is almost non-existent, if not tucked away in some random parts of the newspaper. It has never been brought forward to the people who really need to hear these stories. I don’t agree with all the good news that has been projected across the media by trying to display a distorted image.

Rural India is in great distress, inching towards grave times. They are somehow surviving because of the public distribution of food etc. in most States.

When the farmer grows a plentiful crop, meaning so much more than he grew last year, it should be a reason for celebration, but instead the price falls, since there is an abundance of supply in the market and the farmers who should be celebrating actually walks away in tears. The minimal support the government can extend is by purchasing the crops at a certain floor value while ensuring that the price won’t fall below that value.

Our finance Minister has very specifically mentioned that four thousand four hundred crores rupee worth of milk has been purchased during the lockdown. Here we are in our ‘unlock period’ and there is milk being spilled on the streets of Maharashtra, Kolhapur etc. The fact is that the milk-producing farmers have not been given their due prices.

Maharashtra usually produces 1.60 crore litres of milk each year. During the lockdown it has reduced to 70 lakhs, which is almost 50% of the usual quantity. In some areas the milk prices have dipped below 20 rupees/litre. Secondly the government of India has allowed an import of 10 thousand tons of powdered milk during the lockdown.

When in India the capacity of milk produced is more than 350 tons, then what was the need for the government to import dried milk in such trying times! Instead of paying the farmers and helping them with some kind of subsidy, the government is misspending money in importing uselessly.

Of course the government is not responsible for the locust (pun intended). But when there were early warnings been given precisely in the year 2019, that was the time when the locust problem could have been dealt with. Moreover, the irrigation, damming, water management policies havebeen so defective to stymie lives from the havoc caused the floods.

I read an article by Yogendra Yadav recently where he said, “If India starts acting on the yearly floods in Bihar and Assam that would be true nationalism”. Earlier, floods were a curse of nature, now floods are being the curse of policies. Farmers are at the receiving end of everything, from insects, to floods, to locusts, and of course to the spiralling crash of prices.

Who needs to hear these stories?

Anybody who eats grain, vegetable or drinks milk or consumes egg or chicken or anything else in this country. If you eat, you need to know where your food is coming from and you need to be empathetic and sympathetic to the people who are growing your food. Not to forget, this country was built on the slogan “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan”.

We have unfortunately, over the past few decades forgotten the latter half of the slogan.

29-07-2020

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