The emerging agrarian crisis

I was employed as an agricultural labour with the local landlord in the village when I was just 15,” said the old man, at least 70 now. “My father had three acres of land. I worked for a number of years for the landlord and my land holding expanded to 15 acres. I was happy; daughters were married and I did not have to work anymore. Now, however, I have only four acres left. I am back to where I was!”

He smiled and thereby hangs a tale. A tale of peasantisation and depeasantisation witnessed in one single lifetime of a family in Vidarbha. This tragedy is symptomatic of lost opportunities, incorrect prioritisation and insensitivity towards the life of the peasantry. More than one hundred and fifty thousand farmers all over the country have committed suicide in the country in the last decade and a half. All these suicides have happened in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab and Karnataka. In Maharashtra, the largest number of suicides has occurred in the Vidarbha region in the last five years. Studies have indicated that the farmers who have committed suicide were driven to their tragic end by a threefold crisis caused by trade liberalisation and globalisation policies, deregulation of inputs, imports and prices and the inevitable consequence in deepening debt.

Indian agriculture accounts for almost 20% of the total GDP and nearly 75% of the country’s population live in rural areas and hilly terrains. Almost 60-70% of the GDP from agriculture is from subsistence agriculture. Investment in agriculture has been declining for quite some years.

A rough estimate indicates that an overall reduction of investment in the rural sector is to the tune of 60% compared to the year 1985. This decline in investment is responsible for a dependency on credit from the private sector. The total investment in agriculture as percentage of GDP has declined from 1.6% to 1.3%. Successive Indian governments slashed their expenditure on rural development (including expenditure on agriculture, rural development, special areas programme, irrigation and flood control, village industry, energy and transport—the figures are for Centre and states combined) from 14.5% of GDP in 1985–90 to 5.9% in 2000–01.

Decline in the public sector investment is quite sharp—27%—and there is a corresponding rise in the investment from the private sector by 13%. The overall credit supply to agriculture from the private sector stands at 75% of the total credit made available. As public sector investment in agriculture is slashed, a whole range of input costs are hiked, bank credit is slashed, domestic crops face competition from cheap imports, and price support operations are reduced or wound up, more and more peasants are losing their land.

The proportion of landless households among total rural households has risen from 35% to 41% between 1987-88 and 1999-2000. Since it is the small farms that are able to make more intensive use of the labour of members of the household, when peasants lose their land employment too declines. Marginal farms, which are unviable and hence unable to provide much employment, have grown from 19% to 22% of rural households; thus landless and marginal together account for 63% of rural households, up from 55% in 1987-88.

Thus today nearly half of India’s children below the age of three are malnourished and stunted and 40% of rural India eats only as much food as Sub-Saharan Africa.According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, India is one among 17 countries where the number of the undernourished decreased in the first half of the 1990s, before increasing in the second half to almost completely offset the gains of the earlier part of the decade. The official National Sample Survey of 2000 revealed that three-fourth of India’s rural population and half the urban population did not get the minimum recommended calories.

This is confirmed by nutritional and health surveys, which reveal the following: more than two-fifth of the adult population suffer from chronic energy deficiency and a large percentage are at the border of this condition; half of India’s women are anaemic; half its children can be clinically defined as malnourished (stunted, wasting, or both). There is already a sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) within India—half of our rural population or over 350 million people are below the average food energy intake of SSA countries. Rural India teeters on the edge of the precipice and the signs are ominous. The peasantry, reduced to beggary pushed into committing suicides has also shown signs of protest. The firing on the farmers in Uttar Pradesh, Vidarbha, Nandigram, and the killing fields of Punjab are the flashpoints that need to be taken seriously. After all how many deaths more and stunted and wasted human beings it is going to take before the polity realises its responsibility towards its once proud peasantry.

(The author is a noted social scientist)