Had there been a waiver of debt of up to just
Rs.25,000, more than 80 per cent of Vidharbha’s
farmers would no longer have owed the banks money.

FARMERS ACROSS the land will doubtless be
ecstatic on learning there is now one more
committee - to look into debt relief. Gee,
another committee. Just what we needed. Who
knows, it might even do something, like form a
sub-committee. But the joy might be hard to
sustain. It’s all part of a package.' That too is not a new thing. Governments in this country have handled more packages than FedEx. My all-time favourite is the Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput or KBK package, which has outlasted four Prime Ministers and seen more variations than Rubik's Cube. Every imaginable programme for which funds already exist has been merged or purged from the KBK development package at some point. A Rs.4,750 crore package swelled to Rs.6,500 crore over a decade. Of which only Rs.360 crore actually showed up till 2004. Even from that paltry sum, money was diverted for the total literacy programme. Thepackage’ declared at the end of Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh’s trip to Vidharbha will
have little or no impact on the crisis there.
Neither in the short run nor in the long term.
The visit’s political fallout is another matter.
No one can now deny a major agrarian crisis
exists. Dr. Singh’s journey thoroughly exposed
the Maharashtra Government and the Union
Agriculture Ministry. It also brought - if for a
week - some media focus on the crisis. Well on
the farm suicides, at least.

Yet the suicides are the effect, not the cause,
of a much wider agrarian distress. The death
count is not the story but a window to it. There
are millions of farm households across the
country that have not seen suicides but whose
conditions are similar to those that have. They
too are in deep trouble.

Yet the question will be asked - will farmers’
suicides in Vidharbha halt now that there’s a
financial package' to bring it relief? The answer is no. The deaths do have seasonal highs and lows. But a relative decline now would have little to do with the measures announced at the end of the Prime Minister's visit. The number of suicides in the 10-day run-up to his trip: 34. The number in 10 days after he left: 34. It was no one's case that farm suicides would end with the visit. But people wanted steps that would slow the bleeding and restore hope. That did not happen. Advance bonus The first thing the Prime Minister could have done or made the State Government do, was to restore theadvance bonus’ of Rs.500 a quintal
for cotton. The State withdrew this in May 2005.
Appeals by growers - and even by the National
Commission on Farmers (NCF) - were ignored. We
knew all hell would break loose. It did. If
suicide numbers were high when the price of
cotton was Rs.2,250, how could things get better
when it fell to Rs.1,700 a quintal? That too due
to state policy? (There is also no mention in the
new deal of a price stabilisation fund' called for by the NCF to protect farmers against the shock of plummeting prices.) The finalpackage’ ignored this vital demand.
Nor did it announce a debt waiver though many in
power know there is no escape from such a
measure. Some government of India will have to do
this at some point. Sure, it would draw flak and
cries of fiscal imprudence' from the ideologically devout. (Though, when tens of thousands of crores are written off for a handful of industrialists, that is barely reported. Unlike that pampered lot, farmers have landed where they are due to policies hostile to agriculture for over a decade.) Had there been a waiver of debt of up to just Rs.25,000, more than 80 per cent of Vidharbha's farmers would no longer have owed the banks money. People thought that waiver would come. It didn't and the sense of being let down is great. This matters across the country, too. Indebtedness amongst farm households has almost doubled in the past decade. The good aspect of thepackage’ was, of course,
the promise of crop loans to all farmers across
the board. This could help many tide over the
current season. But the interest waiver of Rs.712
crore mainly helps banks that have been hostile
to farm lending. And some of the banks were
anyway looted by the rich barons of the ruling
elite, not by poor farmers. The move does not put
a new rupee in the farmer’s pocket. Since the
principal amount has not been waived, the debt
crisis will renew itself rapidly. Besides, there
is no help with seed or other inputs. Not even a
promise of it.

The package gives Rs.2177 crore to 82 major and
medium and 442 minor irrigation projects in the
six districts it covers. Much of this simply
revises book entries. That is, it draws money
from existing programmes. If all these schemes
were completed tomorrow, they would not add three
per cent of acreage to irrigated area. That, in a
region where irrigated land adds up to just 11
per cent of the total. Sure, people want water.
But all problems are not due to lack of
irrigation. Distress suicides have occurred in
irrigated parts of Punjab and Andhra Pradesh.

There was and is total silence on the Maharashtra
Water Resources Regulatory Authority Act, 2005.
This regressive law puts irrigation beyond the
reach of all except corporate farmers. It could
raise irrigation costs by thousands of rupees per
acre. It also allows an unelected authority to
compel farmers to use drip or sprinkler
irrigation. Those unable to pay the huge rate
hikes in the offing could face fines of up to ten
times the new charges. They could also face six
months imprisonment. And yes, farmers with more
than two children pay one and a half times those
rates anyway.

The new package is silent on this. It has nothing
for the 85 per cent non-irrigated farmers now
shut out from even the chance of having that
facility. Its gift of Rs.225 crore for
horticulture and Rs.87 crore for drip irrigation
will touch only those who already have access to
water.

There is also not a whisper of incentives for
food crops in the package.' The rebirth of jowar would have helped farmer, soil, and food security. Suicides are far higher among cash crop farmers than among food crop growers here. It would also have seen the revival of livestock - jowar is where the fodder comes from. Instead, there is Rs.180 crore for "seed replacement." This sounds like gifting big bucks to people pushing Bt and other exotic seed that would further ruin farmers here. The same sum could have been used for an incentive of Rs.1000 per acre for growing jowar. Instead, we got notions like gifting a thousand high yielding cows to farmers in each of six districts here. For those with no access to fodder and struggling to feed their families, these cows will eat them out of hearth and home. Meanwhile, the Maharashtra Government has raised its ownrelief package’ for Vidharbha farmers
from Rs.1075 crore to over Rs.1300 crore. Since
no one ever took this deal seriously, it matters
little. The first commissioner in charge of this
package' left after weeks, disbursing nothing. He was never given the money to do so. His replacement had barely unpacked his bags when he went off to do poll duty in Tamil Nadu. So months passed with nothing happening. Except, of course, the suicides. Those kept happening. Meanwhile, the Union Agriculture Ministry, feeling left out, kept threatening its ownpackage’ for some months. Then it said it had
drawn up one that the Prime Minister would
announce in Vidharbha. Like the Prime Minister
was its postman or PRO. Still, it meant there was
one more package' in the running. None of these has a word on the strengthening of cotton procurement by the state machinery. With big corporations now free to directly buy and sell in any quantities they wish, prices will be steadily pushed down by cartels. The media focus, of course, is on the initialhigher price’ they
seem to offer. So it’s barely noticed that the
price takes a dive very soon after.

Sadly, what might have been a useful short-term
remedy was drowned in flawed national policy that
remains anti-farmer. Dragged down by double
standards on fiscal imprudence.' Never allowed to meet people's real needs. TheVidharbha
package’ also ran aground on the rocky shores of
State politics. Who would get the credit' for bringing relief? Who would land the blame for years of neglect? Not a single top leader of Maharashtra had entered a grieving household prior to the Prime Minister's visit. So his doing so would be a real problem, disgracing them in the public eye. That saw a gang-up to undermine the tour and its agenda. Dr. Singh's visit to a village like Koljhari in Yavatmal was scuttled for reasons plainly false. Ultimately, though, you cannot have apackage’
going one way while policy moves in the reverse
direction. Vidharbha’s farmers sought urgent
relief. They find themselves left only with
packaging.