Need rural resurgence
LIKE the Indian economy, where the headline figures are quite hunky-dory, Punjab’s agriculture looks robust with its paddy and wheat production. In both cases, the gleaming surface hides deep-rooted problems. It is understandable that the farmers of Punjab are a worried lot despite their rich harvest because they realise that they are on shaky ground.
THE TRIBUNE DEBATE Agrarian distress
A government in the election mode is eager, and even anxious, to paper over the chinks in the economy. Leaders of the ruling party are doing what they have to do. They cannot afford to think of structural issues in the economy when they have to focus on electoral considerations. Some experts do not want to speak of the macro problems plaguing the economy. They are afraid of losing their sinecures. The farmers have no electoral compulsions. They want to grapple with the problems of the day after tomorrow. The Central Government is naive to think that it can divert attention from the farmers’ protest by announcing a hike in the fair and remunerative price of sugarcane.
Reorganising village life in a neo-Gandhian fashion could be a way to deal with the crisis. Rural economies can be reinvented without drawing people away from their homesteads.
Farmers of Punjab already know what experts say — the Green Revolution has become counter-productive. They can feel it in their bones. They cannot go for the remedy as easily as it is pronounced by experts: crop diversification. They do not have the financial muscle to survive the transition. Punjab’s agricultural crisis is a long-standing one. It goes back to the 1990s. Neither economists nor governments have paid attention to it. The farmers cannot afford to implement long-term strategies to get out of the rut they are in.
Agriculture contributes 25 per cent to Punjab’s GDP — lower than the services sector (40 per cent) — but absorbs 50 per cent of the labour. This sticks out like a sore thumb. But it is not peculiar to the state. It is a national phenomenon. There is also the fact that the average landholding in Punjab is 3.7 hectares per farmer. Somewhere, the logic of land redistribution has run aground. It did in West Bengal under the Left Front rule. The small farms contributed their mite to making India self-sufficient in food production. It was a blinkered success. And it is time for a rethink.
What are the farmers supposed to do? All they can ask for are government guarantees for the procurement of their crops. And like earlier governments, the Modi dispensation cannot offer anything more than palliative measures like the minimum support price. The government’s hands are tied because its ability to pay through incentives or subsidies is limited. And it does not address the core issues.
What Punjab really needs is a crop holiday where the production of wheat and paddy is stopped completely for some years and the farmers compensated for it. The government would not want to do it because this would endanger food security in the country. Though states like Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand have become the new rice bowls, the government would not want to risk ending cereal production in Punjab and Haryana. The government’s offer of assured MSP for pulses, maize and cotton for five years reveals the uncertainty involved in crop diversification. The domestic consumption of maize and pulses is not as high as that of wheat and paddy. Cotton is a commercial crop, but when it goes through the cycle of boom and bust, the farmers will not be able to withstand the shocks of fluctuation. The government has no vision as to how to make the necessary shifts in agriculture. The farmers’ protests are symptomatic of the ingrained problems in agriculture. An MSP hike and crop diversification are short-term solutions.
Governments in general — and the Modi government is no exception — think in mechanical terms. Shifting the population away from agriculture is one of them. Poor people who move to cities and live in shanties are embracing a hazardous way of life. The Covid-19 pandemic brought home this fact when the poor trudged back to their villages from big cities in the summer of 2020, and they lingered in the villages even after the pandemic receded. They found security and sustenance in the village. And they picked up jobs in the village, in surrounding ones, and even in nearby towns. The cost of living weighed heavily on them.
Sociologists have already noted that not all the people living in a village are dependent on agriculture and its low wages. There are untapped social and economic networks in the hinterland. Punjab could become a big social experiment in creating livelihoods based on the social needs of the people, which would qualify to be described in modern terms as the service economy. There is an embedded service sector in the villages that is yet to be tapped.
Reorganising village life in a neo-Gandhian fashion could be one way of dealing with the agricultural crisis. The farmers should not fear that if they fail to produce record harvests, they will face impoverishment. Rural economies can be reinvented without the prospect of drawing people away from their homesteads. It has become fashionable for the rich and super-rich city folk to buy farmhouses and make rural life chic. This is a model that can be turned into an advantage for the larger good. People living in villages can make their lives meaningful by reviving what has been sidelined as cottage industries of weavers and carpenters and enlarging the scope by promoting micro-industries in the rural set-up. The connectivity between villages, towns and cities should make it easier to establish a production unit anywhere. This cannot be achieved by politicians, bureaucrats and economists. It has to be done by the people themselves, by moving from urban habitats to rural ones, and incentivising the emergence of a service sector, which one finds in kitschy tourist spots. Living in a clean environment in a rural setting could be the catchword. The farmers’ nightmare of falling crop output and failing agriculture should end.
