A N A L Y S I S

India with a Shining Black Eye
Gobind Thukral

Ever since the reforms began in 1991, agriculture sector was pushed to the back. Our prime ministers and finance ministers have made usual umpteen noises about the growth, indulged in platitudes and finally did nothing to move the farm sector on to the growth chart. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Finance Minister P. Chidambaram are no better than the previous sets.

Only platitudes and are in plenty. They know the crisis, yet have done nothing substantial to mitigate the suffering of the hapless farmers, resorting to suicides. Take this year’s budget. Their model is growth for growth sake. And is the ideology of the cancer cell. Few things grow as relentlessly as that cell does, with such fatal results. Faster growth not necessarily gets translated into welfare the majority of the Indians.  They now talk about sustainable and inclusive growth. It is neither. This experience is repeated year after year. The appalling distress in the countryside is just one measure of this. Every election rubs this. Punjab and Uttrakhand elections that have cast aside the ruling Congress and later Uttar Pradesh elections which would bring similar results prove this.  The United Progressive Alliance seems to have learnt nothing and forgotten everything.

The government has for long known that there is a frightful crisis in agriculture and the rural India has cried hoarse for some lasting solution. Even the government’s own economic surveys admit as do the ministers and their supreme leader Mrs. Sonia Gandhi.  She did shed some precious  tears  over the death of farmers and Manmohan Singh even paid a visit to Vidharbha where hundreds of farmers have committed suicides and continue to do so even now . In March alone eight cotton growing farmers had ended their valuable lives. And, yet despite tall talk there is nothing on the ground to show any substantial public spending in farm sector. This budget does not break with neo-liberalism. Rather just dolls it up. Here the mainstream media; the newspapers and the 24 hour television channels, making fast buck as advertisements revenue from the large companies shed tears only for the cash rich fat corporate sector. Look at the editorials, slants in news coverage and the inspired stories, all placate the rich and the famous.

In 2004, this government took a noteworthy step and setup a National Commission on Farmers to look deeply at the grim situation.  It is hard to find even   one of its many vital proposals addressed in this budget.  There is no Price Stabilisation Fund as suggested by the Commission. No debt relief and forget the loan waiver. Nothing on price control except steel and cement. Commodity speculation goes nearly unchecked. If Punjab had got something besides price stability, Congress might have rolled back to power despite the bad image in the urban areas where it was just routed.

Do not expect to see any reduction in the input costs.  Corruption and racketeering on that front is untouched. It seems the government is in complicity with the agencies that produce or sell inputs. The so called `huge' boost for rural credit does not touch the high interest rates, which are a major source of trouble. Everybody knows well that small and marginal farmers have got nothing from its earlier `expansion' of credit. Any banker can tell the fate of the poor farmers. No incentives for food crops in crisis regions of the country. As cotton growers in India commit suicides, cotton from America which is sustained by heavy subsidies of billions of dollars continues to be dumped here. These devastate prices here and elsewhere too. U.S. raw cotton exports to India had tripled now to more than a million bales from 2001. Why can not the government increase duty on these imports which remains at 10 per cent. If this is a pro-farmer budget, it's scary to think of what an anti-farmer one would appear like.

Some of the higher allocations in the budget are negative when adjusted for inflation. The increase spending on the government's much touted employment programme is up by 7 per cent only. This only means stagnation given inflation levels of nearly the same pr cent. To begin with, it was given Rs.11, 300 crore when it needed much more. And that was for 200 districts. Now it is to be "expanded" to 330 districts. But the outlay goes up by just Rs.700 crore. The number of districts covered goes up 40 per cent and the money goes up six per cent.  Wonderful. Reports from many districts suggest the tardy implementation of this programme. Same way the increase in outlays on food subsidies, at 6.2 per cent, means little in real terms.

After the Prime Minister's Independence Day Speech in 2006, we all had expected something different. That was a rare occasion. Manmohan Singh spoke clearly of the state of farmers. Even rarer for an I-Day speech, he chose Vidharbha for special mention. And he evidently recognized a major crisis was on in rural India. Not a trace of that sentiment can be found in the game of numbers of this budget.

The `huge' hike in outlays for health still does not bring even the modest 2-3 per cent of GDP level promised in 2004. View educations outlays as share of GDP and you see how far behind we still are. Only solace is primary education there. In the end, though, it's not just about sector to sector funding. It's the whole direction. And in that very little has changed. India is still on a course that is damaging and dangerous to the poor. This was our India Shining for the NDA and is now India Rising and India Poised.

The price rise, among other things, was and is a major issue. But the government's response is at most levels tokenism. No a lesson has been learnt by this government from the past. Like others before it, it imagines it will make some course corrections just before the polls and hoodwink the voters to favour it. It has forgotten the reasons for its victory in 2004. It possibly does not want to make out just how dreadful the crisis in the countryside is.

We are now at that mid-way mark where, historically, the Congress perks up the Bhartiya Janata Party that has been gasping for breath after 2004 and regains its oxygen. Punjab and Uttrakhand are stark reminders. Yet, in the present major political groupings, there is hardly any hope for the farmers.

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