-- Ranjani
I n her letter to the Prime Minister, Sonia Gandhi was so cynical , in her letter to the Prime Minister,enough to say that only 25,000 suicides have taken place in Karnataka, since the Congress party assumed power in the state,while it was in contrast to 50,000during in the previous regime. And Mallikarjuna Kharge, the Home Minister of Karnataka, blames the opposition parties for making hue and cry over the recent suicides, as according to him, only 600 farmers have committed suicide this year in comparison to 650, last year. TheoWhile the opposition parties in the state have not gone beyond the demanding for waiving bank loans and reducting electricity tariffs, while the state government is busy deciding the eligibility for a compensation of Rs.1 lakh.
Farmers’ suicides are a sad commentary on the impact of liberalization policies that made agriculture unremunerative. Neither the ruling party nor the opposition parties, including the party of the ‘farmer’ Devea Gowda, are prepared to confront the reality and address the issues squarely.
Of course, so many problems are involved – ranging from the severe, unrelentingnon-stop drought conditions, skyrocketinged infrastructural and input costs, crashing prices for outputs, exorbitant rates of interest for loans coupled with extra- economic coercion by money lenders,and middlemen,, traders, etc. If he drought wasbeen the all-pervading cause, the suicides would have got confined mainlyit is not to the drought-ridden North Karnataka region. In contrast, even in Kaveri irrigated areas like Maddur taluk of Mandya district, the Chief Minister’s own constituency, many people have diedresorted to suicide.
Though farmers’ suicides have been recurring in Karnataka since 1998, what is alarming this time is the scale and spread of such incidents. Over 210 farmers have committed suicide in Karnataka within a span of five months from April this year. The suicides were intense between August 1 and September 12, with an average of five suicides for every two days and are still going on unabated. Not only are the individual farmers committing suicide, the entire family is getting wiped out in some cases. The highest number of such suicide deaths is from southern and central Karnataka regions like Davangere (30), Mandya (22), Shimoga (18) and Hassan (15). From being a phenomenon of the drought-prone regions, the suicides have spread to fairly prosperous newer regions and irrigated belts as well,thus, covering the whole state, barring the four districts of coastal Karnataka. This is a telling evidence of the alarmingly escalation of agrarian distress, not merely the drought, in the context of liberalization and globalisation policies in the state.
Successive droughts and untimely rains have seriously affected farmers for past three-four years. Crop failures due to drought, untimely rains, crop diseases, spurious seeds, substandard fertilizers and pesticides have hit at their bottoms. Price crashes have been causing further damages. Institutional credits are not reaching out to the needy as the repayment prospects are ambiguous. Input prices have been soaring; fertilizer and power subsidies are squarely scissored.
Secondary occupations like cattle rearing and sericulture have also been affected by consecutive droughts and price crash due to the import of China silk respectively. On top of this, efforts to overcome the water scarcity through digging bore wells, etc., have landed them in further indebtedness. The visibly “invisible, anonymous” moneylender cum tradesman cum middleman pushing the farmers to the verge of suicide by extracting exorbitant interests, commissions and indulging in public harassments has become a day-to-day affair in farmers’ lives. It is not just a single failure, rather a series of setbacks that has accumulated and become unbearable over a period of time that has endangered farmers’ lives.
In parts of Haveri and Davangere districts, large lands – to the tune of 500 acres in one such case – have been allocated to gherkin (tiny cucumber) growing multinational companies. Through such “effective” contract farming, the farmers are already in great trouble due to soil erosion, loss in moisture absorbing quality of the soil, diseases and so on. Neither can they stop cultivating gherkins nor can they withdraw from these contracts. The extent of agricultural de-skilling and dependency that is bred behind such contract farming is shocking.The Here, the farmer has no control whatsoever on his land, the cultivation practice and culture.
At every instance of suicide, the government has denied that the suicides are due to crop failure or agrarian distress. The government had even stopped the payment of a compensation of 1 lakh rupees for the victim’s families for a considerable period, following a very ‘intelligent’ report submitted by the Joint House Committee in 1999.
The government formedconstituted another committee, under the chairmanship ofheaded by G.K.Veeresh, a retired Vice Chancellor of Agricultural University, whichthat submitted its report in 2000, reaffirming the same conclusion, not to pay the compensation. Perhaps, formation of Veeresh Ccommittee was the first ever organized effort on the part of the state in the entire country to probe and suggest remedial steps to overcome the phenomenon of farmers’ suicides. The committee’s methodology, as narrated by one of its senior members, appeared more like a criminal investigation than that was supposed to suggest preventive measures for the recurrence of such incidents in the future. The committee was proud for having adopted a ‘psycho-economic’ approach, only to conclude that the suicide was a personal choice of individuals. Any committee, which is supposed to propose an institutional solution to the issue, cannot escape by putting the blame on individuals for this extreme step of ending their own lives. Otherwise, the whole purpose of such a committee to find an institutional solution itself will get defeated. And ‘psychology’ can provide no key to resolve the basic economic complexities.
The committee found the highest probability of causes of suicides as “alcohol-related problems” followed by “indebtedness”, “chronic illness”, “family disorders” and “family responsibilities”. For them, crop failure and price crash did not appear to be a probable cause! The committee dealt its ‘masterstroke’ by underlining that the agrarian distress prevailing in the state and the suicides does not have any correspondence. The committee’s ‘brilliance’ was revealed in its suggestion for not paying any compensation in order to prevent suicides asserting that it could act as an “encouraging or driving factor for more suicides” and recommended to pay Rs.10,000 only, equating farmers suicides on par with unnatural accidents!
Perhaps, Karnataka was one of the few states where land reforms had been relatively more thoroughgoing, next only to Kerala, despite all its distortions and rampant irregularities. But, the committee did not feel constrained to recommend far-reaching amendments to the Karnataka Land Reforms Act that would undo all the progressive elements of the legislation. Because, in its opinion, the main reason for suicides is that small parcels of land – ranging up to 5 acres, are un-remunerative. So, it recommended the government to amend the Act in order to alienate small parcels of land from the small peasants. What an excellent masterpiece of an idea to transform suicides into starvation deaths!
The committee did not stop at that. It went further by suggesting possible means to get rid of smallholdings, i.e., by handing over large tracts of lands to the private corporate houses. If the corporate houses take over lands through appropriate methods, including contract farming, they are expected to have large capital to invest and sustain agricultural operations.
Another significant aspect of Karnataka land reforms is that it abolished tenancy, at least on paper. It is another thing that illegal tenancy is rampant all over the state. When compared to Kerala and West Bengal, which were basically tenancy reforms, land reforms in Karnataka has moved a little ahead in spite of many discrepancies and distortions. Still, it paved way for relatively larger, if not sufficient, distribution of land to the landless, particularly Dalits and most backwards. It is also true that illegal tenants today are unable to have access to institutional credit, as they do not enjoy ownership over the land. Therefore, the committee has suggested legalisation of tenancy to facilitate reverse tenancy or in other words, legally restoring the land alienated from big landowners. Corporate houses are also free to take advantage of the recommendation. The committee has absolved the state from the responsibility of increasing public investment to provide necessary infrastructure facilities and institutional credit mechanism to small and marginal farmers. The committee has echoed the ruling idea of corporatisation and contractorisation as a panacea to arrest the decline in agriculture and prepares to sacrifice the interests of small and marginal farmers.
Apart from this, the committee has also recommended creation of ‘Farmers Welfare Fund’ through equal contribution by farmers and the government, pension and other facilities to ‘Senior Farmers’ who crossed 60 years of age, Farmers State Insurance Scheme along the lines of ESI scheme, etc. They have given some vague and general recommendations like differential pricing of power, area-specific, crop-specific, group-specific credit policy so as to support targeted groups. These recommendations too do not address the real issue of making agriculture remunerative in order to avoid suicides. Instead, they make the farmers responsible even for minimum social security measures.
S. M. Krishna government announced a compensation of Rs.1 lakh to all suicide victims’ families and formed a committee to scrutinize the genuineness of the case. Out of 208 cases till 8 Sep, only 156 have been placed before the committee, of which the committee declared only 63 cases as genuine. Of this, the compensation package has been disbursed only to 20 families. However, it is moneylenders who are pocketing the compensation in most of the cases, and the money never really reaches the victims’ families. The government is a mere spectator to this fact.
The government has also brought an ordinance to curb the menace of usury on exorbitant rates of interest to the tune of 60%. The ordinance has made charging of an interest rate more than 21-23% illegal. But, any ordinance can have meaning only when farmers have an option of choosing between higher and fair interest rates. Now, they have no choice as most of the farmers have no access to institutional credit for reasons ranging from pending arrears payment to repeated crop failures or bore well failures. The precondition is to make institutional credit available to all small peasants through sufficient fund allocation for agriculture, establishing a vast network of credit providing mechanism and in the specific context of Karnataka, making the rules liberalized so as to reach credit facilities to all the actual tillers-in-need, irrespective of land titles. The Monopoly Cotton Procurement Scheme along the lines of Maharashtra in which a portion of MSP is disbursed in advance should also be considered.
The government has also announced setting up of a ‘Farmers Welfare Fund’ with an initial corpus amount of Rs.200 crores to meet the social security needs of the farmers, but no details have been worked out yet. One can only wait and see if it is an election gimmick like payment of compensation to the suicide victims.
Agricultural Product Marketing Committee (APMC) is open all over the state, in every taluk headquarters. Though they are supposed to procure the produces directly from the peasants, in reality, no peasant visits APMC because of rampant corruption, distant location and umpteen number of irregularities. It is only the middleman or the broker who is usually, a trader-cum-moneylender-cum-pesticide/fertilizer seller-cum-landlord, deals with the peasants as well as APMCs. APMCs, in most cases are located in far away places, mainly towns and the peasants have to spend considerable amount for transportation of their produce and they tend to avoid it by selling their produce to the middlemen. Moreover, majority of peasants are dependant on middlemen in innumerable ways. Middlemen depress the procurement prices below MSP. The government’s package to prevent suicides does not even contain a single word to check the menace of the purely illegal system of middlemen. Rather, it talks of forward trading, a euphemism for legalizing brokerage system.
In this context, it goes without saying that the impact of fluctuation of prices in domestic and international markets is playing havoc in the lives of small peasants. Removal of Quantitative Restrictions on imports and cutting down subsidies has dealt a deathblow to the already limping Indian agriculture. Indian markets are open for a loot by developed countries while Indian farmers are pushed into an unequal trade with the developing countries whose agriculture is absolutely subsidized and trade tariff protected.
Programmes like SGRY or Food for Work, the last resort for most peasants and agrarian labourers was supposed to provide employment to the needy and the poor, but it has actually benefited only the contractors. The contractors employ machines like JCP, Poclane and others that reduce and replace human labour. Even worse is the fact that the same grains released from FCI at lower prices as an exchange for the labour gets recycled through contractors-traders-rice millers and promptly returns to FCI at a higher procurement price. Thus, the last hope of getting some employment through employment generation programmes is also belied.
The moneylender or the Middleman, usually, is a local power elite or landlord with whom the peasant is tied in hundred and one ways. The moneylender operates on the shadow of others and the government has not taken any measure to check these neo-landlords who control all agricultural operations right from supply of seeds, pesticides, fertilizers and implements to procurement and sales. No welfare measures of the government can actually reach the needy small peasants as long as the neo-elites who control rural resources, facilities and power are clipped of their powers of extra-economic coercion. Only an assertion of a radical, militant peasant movement in contrast to the farmers’ associations led by kulaks can really throw a challenge to the neo-elites. A comprehensive change of agrarian policies oriented towards making agriculture remunerative by upholding the interests of small and marginal peasants alone can be a long-term answer to the larger issue of agrarian crisis. And such a reorientation alone can really check farmers’ suicides that are the extreme manifestation of the present agrarian crisis facing the state and the country.
Yesterday, it was single farmer’s suicide, today mass suicides are being witnessed. Not only are the victims’ families facing series of setbacks, the distress is permeating into the whole rural society. Though the extent of crisis may vary in time and quantum, and the mechanisms of recovery from the crisis at hand can be different, the more common the distress is becoming the more urgent it needs to be addressed.