India's farm crisis putting achieved green revolution benefits at risk

by Ramtanu Maitra

India's rural sector has lain in deep distress for years now. It seems the present administration is keen to drive the final nails into the coffin and bury the hopes of the agricultural sector for good.

Thousands of farmers have committed suicide in recent years for a number of reasons; the most important perhaps of those was the sheer neglect by New Delhi of a sector which needed immediate attention for years. Instead of attending to a sector which warehouses almost 60% of India's workforce, many of whom are nominally associated with farm work, the Indian political leaders were eager to generate quick capital by investing big in the information technology sector, which provides jobs to the educated, skilled minority, amounting to less than 0.5% of India's workforce.

It is evident where the present Indian leadership's priorities lie. But, it is a shame because of what has been done to India's farmers, who were the principal reason that India became self-sufficient in food, and kept its sovereignty intact in the difficult decades of the 1970s and 1980s. But it is a shame also because the present crop of Congress Party high-fliers are the so-called flag-bearers of the old Congress Party of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who fought the odds internationally to usher in the Green Revolution that lifted India from being a "basket case" to a food-self-sufficient nation. Despite the devastation caused to the agricultural sector by India's current leaders, and those who lost political power recently, it is still the effect of the Green Revolution that allows India's one billion-plus people to be fed with minimal food imports.

Mrs. Indira Gandhi, who dominated India's political scene during the difficult Cold War period, spanning the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, and even when she was out of power between 1977 and 1980, will always be remembered for her contribution of the Green Revolution to the nation. The success of the Green Revolution not only prevented large-scale hunger within India, but enabled the world to see that such a seemingly impossible objective can be reached within a few years if the leadership remains committed, focused, and dedicated to the purpose. It also provided India the necessary legs to stand on before the world, and project itself as a nation capable of handling difficult odds.

Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, India's leading agro-scientist, who along with the legendary Dr. Norman Borlaug, was the brain behind India's green revolution, said that Mrs. Gandhi's efforts to make India self-sufficient in food grains was "more remarkable than even the man walking on the Moon." Dr. Swaminathan reports that Mrs. Gandhi herself used to say, "The discovery of a new seed variety stirs rural people as much as a spacewalk or a transplanted heart does the more literate classes."

What can be found among today's Indian leaders instead is the tolerance among them to let things move backwards. According to economist Utsa Patnaik, large sections of rural India are already starving, or on the brink of starvation. In 1991, per capita average Indian consumption of food grains was 178 kilograms. In 2002, it had fallen to a per capita consumption of 155 kilograms, equivalent to consumption between 1937 and 1942, at the height of the British Raj's policies.

How much damage has been done to the rural population in recent years? In the words of Utsa Patnaik in 2005: "According to National Sample Survey (NSS) data, five years ago [in 2000] more than one-third of the rural population of three states had a daily intake of less than 1,800 calories. Today, according to the latest NSS figures, eight states fall in this category. Half our rural population, or 350 million people, are below the average food energy intake of sub-Saharan Africa."

There are a number of manifestations of the rapid deterioration of India's rural sector. The most frightening is the large-scale suicide by farmers—particularly in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. P. Sainath, the rural sector editor of the English-language daily, The Hindu, and an insistent voice revealing the plight of the neglected farmers of India, points out that about 100,000 farmers have taken their lives in the last five years or so. New Delhi cannot be blamed for the death of all the 100,000 because some farmers, in expectation of a "successful" crop, became indebted heavily in advance. Later, failed crops doomed many such farmers.

In a recent interview, Sainath pointed out that an anti-farmer attitude has entered the Indian political decision-making process in the form of corporate farming. He said that "this is basically the American model. In the U.S., 100-odd family farms are going bankrupt each week. Corporate farming, while it is huge, employs hardly anyone. There are 700,000 people employed in corporate agriculture; even their prisons hold three times as many people (2.1 million). So, basically there's an effort to drive people out of agriculture. And, in the Third World, this is projected as the way to go for us too."

As a result of New Delhi's policy, the farmers find themselves in a hapless state. India's National Sample Survey data showed that 40% of the people in agriculture do not actually want to continue in it, and they want their children to seek other kinds of work.

Sainath points out that these agriculturists need options—and these should be real options. "If we're not going to do that, but simply try to force them out of agriculture somehow, we may as well be bombing the countryside. We're underfunding development greatly. Look at Utsa Patnaik's work—it shows that in 1989, nearly 15% of GDP was spent on development, but by 2005, this had dropped to 6%. No wonder that millions of people—neither workers nor peasants—are moving into the urban areas. They can only work in unorganized jobs, where exploitation is easy." Sainath said.

This brutalization of the rural sector has not been confined to situations in which some farmers commit suicide and others move to urban areas, eventually becoming part of the criminal underworld; many others have revived the violent Maoist movements. As India's GDP growth rose, so did the disparity between rich and poor—and violence and strength of the Maoists.

The devastation wrought by the Maoists has contributed significantly to the breakdown of India's agricultural sector and the degradation of its farming population; this, in turn, has fed the insurgency, leaving India's growing population to face a dangerous shortage of food.

Larouche