Facilitate Farmers To Enhance Their Income
Kulbhushan Upmanyu
(The writer is an environmentalist heading Himalaya Niti Abhiyan)
There was a time when a saying was very popular – Uttam kheti, madhyam vyapar, chakri kare ganwar’. But now the situation is just the opposite. The situation of farmer, the backbone of production economy, has gone from bad to worse. About 55% of population in India still depends on agriculture, considered to be the biggest employment generating field. Wrong policies have put the farmers in a deplorable condition even as scientific progress has increased agriculture production. The country has become self reliant in food grain production but condition of farmers did not improve.
There are many reasons behind it. One of the reason is that farmers don’t get remunerative prices for their produce. The produce of farmers has witnessed 19 times hike since 1947 until now whereas his investment prices have soared by 100 times during the same period. The salaried class earning in the same period increased by 150 to 320 times. As a result, a person doing a job of even labour class is in a better position as compared to a farmer. This is flaw of the business, industrial and urban centric policy that agriculture is now seen as an unskilled profession. A worker doing job in a factory is considered as a skilled worker while farmer is out of this category. And this is despite the fact that farming is not possible without century’s old accumulated and modern knowledge.
Lack of profitable price of produce coupled with increasing production cost has hit farmers badly and landed them in a debt trap. Besides that there is not much change in dependence on weather for farming. Lack of storage facility further forces farmers to sell their produce at cheaper rates. Farmers are also a part of the same society where they have to bear expenses of social rituals and traditions besides competing in modernisation race. But how could that be achieved when a farmer cannot even meet his expenses? Frustrated of the situation, farmers had to stage protest against the prevailing conditions.
Role of political parties in making farmers agitation violent cannot be denied. The political opportunists automatically creep into such movements to make best use of the situation. However major goals of the movement are pushed to the backstage once it turns violent. Farmers should move cautiously in this direction sensing such threats. No doubt increase in income of administration and salaried class is also important. But they do not have direct role in economy whereas whereas farming class is directly involved in production work. The government should set an objective of increasing the income of farmers by one hundred times. Being a base of production economy, farmers should be considered mandatorily eligible for drawing pension after attaining the age of 60 years. Why can’t the country share the burden of productive farmer when it carried the burden of unproductive administrative class?
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