Gobind Thukral

INDIA is a sad witness to hundreds of farmers taking their lives each year. Their desperation finds no other expression when they see themselves trapped neck deep in debt. The union government’s policies, particularly after the economic reforms read pro business and pro industry were introduced. The terms of trade have never favoured the farmers, but after the advent of the Green Revolution and commercialisation of farming, these became worst. The cost of all inputs, machinery like tractors and tubewells’ equipment besides labour have been overshooting what farmers got for their produce.

This is a major reason why cotton growers have taken their lives to escape the debt trap in many parts of the country including Punjab. Now BT cotton where the cost is still higher is troubling them.
On other hand traders, middlemen of kinds have prospered disproportionately. Tractor and other farm equipment producers and sellers have minted money. Traders who buy produce of the farmers are filthily rich and lead comfortable lives as do those who produce chemicals, pesticides fertilizers and other such stuff. Neither the government nor the policy planners offer any explanation. Occasionally some loans are waived. Even on this Republic Day, Indian President, Mrs. Pratibha Patil paid some lips sympathy for the farmers and called for second green revolution. She did not bother to tell the nation that during the last 20 years, over twenty million farmers have left this profession.

The loan waiver year of 2008 when the central government provided Rs 70,000 crores also saw 16,196 farm suicides in the country. According to the National Crime Records Bureau compared to 2007, that’s a fall of just 436. This gives little comfort. There were no major changes in the trend that set in from the late 1990s and worsened after 2002. The tragic truth is that very high numbers of farm suicides still occur within a fast decreasing farm population.

Between just the Census of 1991 and that of 2001, nearly 8 million cultivators quit farming. A year from now, the 2011 Census will tell how many more quit in this decade. It cannot be less. In fact, exodus from farming has intensified after 2001. Since the State-wise farm suicide ratios — number of farmers committing suicide per 100,000 farmers — are the same as 2001 figures, so the 2011 Census will provide an update.

Farm suicides are rising within a declining farm population. Two, an all-India picture disguises the intensity. The devastation lies in the Big 5 States (Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh). These account for two-thirds of all farm suicides during 2003-08. Take just the Big 5 — their percentage of all farm suicides has gone up. Worse, even their percentage of total all-India suicides (all categories) has risen. Poor States like Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are doing very badly for some years now.

In the period 1997-2002, farm suicides in the Big 5 States accounted for roughly one out of every 12 of all suicides in the country. In 2003-08, they accounted for nearly one out of every 10. Punjab farmers now reeling under heavy private debt often end their lives.

The 12-year period data permits comparison of farm suicide numbers for 1997-2002, with how they turned out in the next 6-year period of 2003-2008. All 12 years were pretty bad, but the latter six were decidedly worse. Maharashtra saw a decline in farm suicide numbers in 2005, but the very next year proved to be its worst ever. Since 2006, the State has been the focus of many initiatives. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Vidharbha that year brought a relief package” of Rs.3, 750 crore for six crisis-ridden districts. Add Chief Minister’s Rs.1, 075 crore relief package. Then followed the nearly Rs.9, 000 crore that was Maharashtra’s share of the Rs.70, 000-crore Central loan waiver for farmers. To which the State government added Rs.6, 200 crore for those farmers not covered by the waiver. The State added Rs.500 crore for a one-time settlement for poor farmers who had been excluded from the waiver altogether because they owned over five acres of land.

In all, the amounts committed to fighting the agrarian crisis in Maharashtra exceeded Rs. 20,000 crore across 2006, 2007 and 2008. It does not include huge money given to the sugar barons. Yet, that proved was the worst three-year period ever for any State at any time since the recording of farm data began. During 2006-08, Maharashtra saw 12, 493 farm suicides. That is nearly 600 more than the previous worst of 2002-2005 and 85 per cent higher than the 6,745 suicides recorded in the three-year period of 1997-1999.

The idea of a waiver was not a bad thing. And it was right to intervene. But specific actions were misguided and bungled. Yet it could also be argued that but for the relief the waiver brought to some farmers at least, the suicide numbers of 2008 could have been a lot worse. The waiver was a welcome step for farmers, but it ignored debt from the money lenders and that is why Punjab could not benefit much. It dealt only with bank credit and ignored moneylender debt. So only those farmers with access to institutional credit could benefit. Tenant farmers and poor farmers get their loans mainly from moneylenders. only Kerala addressed the issue of moneylender debt.

The 2008 waiver also excluded those holding over five acres, making no distinction between irrigated and dry land. This devastated many struggling farmers with eight or 10 acres of poor, dry land.

Every suicide has a multiplicity of causes. But when you have nearly 200,000 of them, it makes sense to seek broad common factors within that group. The suicides appear concentrated in regions of high commercialisation of agriculture and very high peasant debt. Cash crop farmers seemed far more vulnerable to suicide than those growing food crops. Yet the basic underlying causes of the crisis remained untouched. A massive decline in investment in agriculture coupled with the withdrawal of bank credit at a time of soaring input prices caused misery. The crash in farm incomes combined with an explosion of cultivation costs, the shifting of millions from food crop to cash crop cultivation with all its risks, the corporate hijack of every major sector of agriculture including, and especially, seed; growing water stress and moves towards privatisation of that resource. The government was trying to beat the crisis with a one-off waiver. Where is the policy for the farm sector that takes care of 60 per cent population and provides food sovereignty?

In late 2007, Union Minister for Agriculture Sharad Pawar confirmed those figures in Parliament citing the same NCRB data. The number has climbed to nearly 2 lakh. The crisis is very much with us. And cosmetic changes just do not help. During 2006-08, Maharashtra suffered 12, 493 farm suicides.

That is 85 per cent higher than the 6,745 suicides it recorded during 1997-1999. And the worst three-year period for any State, any time. that is Sharad Pawar’s home state.

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Poverty syndrome: Various facets

Professor Vinod Anand

THE definition of poverty currently used by various countries , especially developing, for administering their poverty programs are inadequate, because very little research has been done in this area. In fact, it is not easy to have one uniform definition of poverty because there are a number of specific issues that are normally linked with poverty. These are:

• The historical definitions of poverty;
• The use of index numbers in the measurement of poverty;
• Family size and composition adjustments on measures of poverty;
• Geographical variation in public service provision by type of service;
• Regional income differences;
• Wealth and assets and consumption as measures of poverty;
• Poverty standards and the consumption of leisure;
• Determinants of the turn-over rates of poor families;
• Social and economic proxies for poverty;
• Social indicators of poverty; and
• State administrative definitions of poverty.

It is a known fact that the extent of poverty is both severe and staggering all over the world. In this context, many studies report that

• There exists an overlap between poverty and inequality, and that they are closely related;
• incidence of poverty correlates with low levels of health, education, and nutrition, inadequate shelter and other unsatisfactory social conditions;
• Poverty in most of the developing countries, despite being urbanized, still remains overwhelming a rural phenomenon;
• Poverty tends to be concentrated in the areas with little or no access to health, education and infrastructural services like transport and communications;
• Specific characteristics of the poor are limited to only to bi-variate correlations of the poor, and not to joint interrelationships with other characteristics of poverty.

Besides, poverty has many dimensions too. These are briefly mentioned below:

• Larger household size is associated with greater incidence of poverty as measured in terms of household consumption or income per person;
• Child- adult ratios are larger in poor households;
• Higher mortality, especially of children, among the poor households stimulates excess replacement births;
• There exist a strong correlation between high fertility and poverty;
• There is widespread feminization of poverty ( especially in male-dominated societies) in the sense that young females are more exposed to poverty-induced nutritional and health risks;
• Poor households depend heavily on unskilled labour income;
• Poor households often over exploit their immediate physical environment and the subsequent degradation intensifies poverty;
• Poor households increasingly lose access in private and common resources; and
• Poverty in urban areas is often associated with pollution due to the concentration of people, industry, and traffic.
• Poverty gets normally concealed because of the marginalization of the poor by the so-called rich people.

All these contentions constitute what we term as the poverty syndrome, especially in developing countries.

These contentions can be verified with the help of area-specific and people-specific studies with the help of statistical analysis. I would like my readers who are interested in these issues to go ahead with such surveys, find out the results, and then either strengthen or weaken these hypotheses, and finally link their outcomes with the mainstream research in this area.

[The writer is a well known economist and a poet]

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Political economy of insurgencies and protests

Ishtiaq Ahmed

THE ideas of human dignity and decency as understood by modern people are anathema to the Taliban. Wherever the Taliban juggernaut has run roughshod, it has crushed under its deadweight. A colleague made an interesting comment that the Naxalite-Maoist movement in India and the Taliban movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan are the result of economic factors.

That is indeed very true. While both are fuelled by economic deprivation, still one cannot assume that economic deprivation automatically leads to armed resistance or aggression. The recorded history of the last two to three thousand years shows amply the constancy of economic deprivation in all societies and all cultures. On the other hand, the story of resistance is discontinuous; it has come and gone. There have been long periods of history when the wretched of the earth meekly submitted and did nothing to overthrow their oppressors. I sometimes wonder how a handful of Englishmen ruled India for 200 years without encountering any resistance when nationalist writers tell us that British imperialism drove this region from prosperity into poverty. Moreover, overthrowing oppressors has not always been achieved through violence. India’s freedom struggle under Mahatma Gandhi and the civil rights movement of the African-American underclass of the southern states in the US are cases in point. Perhaps more important to analyse is the type of vision and programme that resisting groups want to implement.

The Indian Maoist movement originally emerged as an armed struggle laced in Marxist revolutionary ideology in the late 1960s in West Bengal against landlords and corrupt and brutal officialdom, but after the parliamentary Communists of the CPI-M came to power, it petered out in that province. It then emerged as a violent confrontation between Dalits and upper caste Thakurs (landowners) of Bihar and eastern UP. It spread to the tribal people of Orissa and also to other parts of India where pockets of abject poverty exist. Unable to eke out even a miserable livelihood in the tribal habitats, more and more of such oppressed sections of society joined the Naxalite movement. Maoist insurgencies are now found even in southern India. As far as I know, the Naxalites want poor men, women and children to get adequate food, education and shelter. In popular imagery the movement wants to transform the living hell in which they now live into some idyllic paradise on earth. Naxalites do not prey on young boys of impoverished families and use them as suicide bombers to indiscriminately attack men, women and children.

In contrast the Taliban agenda is just the opposite. The ideas of human dignity and decency as understood by modern people are anathema to the Taliban. Wherever the Taliban juggernaut has run roughshod, it has crushed under its deadweight girls, their schools, flogged women for stepping out of their homes without a male escort, stoned to death men and women for alleged adultery and so on. Their victims are almost invariably the poor and weak sections of society. So, the social and economic agenda of the two movements is diametrically opposite one another. To ascribe to the Taliban the role of social emancipators is a bad joke. The so-called Islamic emirates that the Taliban established in Swat and Malakand Agencies threatened parents to be ready to marry their girl-child of 9 or 10 to Taliban warriors. The purpose of life on earth according to the Taliban is to do jihad and [not] build peace and prosperity, and then one enters paradise after exiting his life on earth.

The political economy of democratic protest in the West to economic deprivation is different. Thus the Corn Laws and New Poor Law of early 19th century England and the medical and unemployment benefits introduced by Chancellor Bismarck of Prussia paved the way for more welfare reforms in the 20th century. The Thatcherite-Reaganite onslaught on the welfare state heralded in the neo-liberal era of unbridled capitalism. It could only partially succeed in denting the social and economic reforms but failed to dislodge the welfare state. Politicians could not undo that because the electorate would never allow that to go too far. Therefore, democracy prevented the demolition of the welfare state in Western Europe. In the US, laissez faire capitalism had a stronger base. Therefore, the welfare state was never very advanced, though Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson and now Barack Obama have been developing an American type of welfare state. Thus for example the economic crisis of 2008 has not devastated American lives the same way as economic crises do in the Third Word.

The political economy of Third World economic deprivation is entirely different. Here there is no welfare state but there used to be once upon a time a developmental state that actively sought to promote education and employment. No doubt the developmental state was afflicted by massive corruption, yet it did deliver some social services. However, when the 1973 Arab-Israeli war broke out it greatly undermined the developmental state. As the price of oil rose, so did the prices of all other commodities. Suddenly one after the other Third World states began to see their foreign debt explode, causing an insurmountable balance of payments problem.

They headed to the World Bank and IMF, which prescribed the so-called Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP). SAP had a standard recipe for states in distress: cut spending on non-productive activities. In practice it meant cuts in spending on schools and hospitals, retrench on employment in the public sector. Since the private sector was poorly developed and millions of people were laid off from their jobs, there was now a sea of humanity available for all sorts of insurgencies. I remember visiting Senegal with a research team from Sweden in 1994. The streets were full of young men who were willing to steal anything. However, just a few years earlier they used to be employed as teachers and office functionaries by the state. SAP ruined their lives.

Fortunately for the affluent world the African masses had no particular ideology to mobilise them. Therefore the most badly hurt part of the world was the least politically involved in armed struggles. Rather African warlords and Western gold and diamond hunters began to use them for civil wars over precious stones and minerals. In the Middle East the unemployed youths were forced to look for succour from other sources than the state. The only alternative left was the mosques. We all know that the Islamists exploited such opportunities to recruit cadres from among the young people facing anomie in the cities where they had come looking for work. The Afghan jihad absorbed some of them but not all. Thus while the economic origin of insurgencies and protests is undeniable, the forms of protest and resistance are mediated by many other factors as well.

Ishtiaq Ahmed is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) and the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. He is also a Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. He has published extensively on South Asian politics. At ISAS, he is currently working on a book, Is Pakistan a Garrison State? He can be reached at isasia@nus.edu.sg
[Courtesy Daily Times, Lahore]

Here there is no welfare state but there used to be once upon a time a developmental state that actively sought to promote education and employment.

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India needs peace and harmony in South Asia

Dr Sawraj Singh

INDIA is the leading country in the South Asian region. It has the largest population and the largest area there. It will be no exaggeration to say that for all practical purposes, this is the area of Indian influence. Therefore, maintaining peace and harmony in the area should be India’s top priority. Pakistan is also a very important country in the region. Peace and harmony in the region primarily depends on relations between Indian and Pakistan. Currently, India is leaning towards America and Pakistan has very close relations with China. Therefore, relations between America and China are bound to affect the region. Afghanistan is also a part of South Asia and the war there is also affecting the region.

The US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently seemed to suggest that if the Islamic fundamentalists launched another attack on India, then it will be difficult to restrain India from taking action against Pakistan. Obviously, he is suggesting that Pakistan is in a position to control the Islamic fundamentalists. Is that really true? Pakistan’s Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani said that Pakistan is not in a position to control the Islamic fundamentalists. He said that Pakistan cannot stop these forces from launching terrorist attacks on Pakistan, then how can it stop them from attacking India? After the attack on Mumbai last year, these forces have launched several attacks on Pakistani cities, including Islamabad, Lahore, and Peshawar. At this time it seems as if there was an open war between the Islamic fundamentalists and the Pakistani army. It is quite clear that the Pakistan government has lost control over these elements. America put a lot of pressure on Pakistan to take tough action against the Islamic fundamentalists when America very well knows that Pakistan is not capable of controlling these elements. Why, then, did Gates issue such a statement?

To find the answer to this question we have to look at the changing situation in America. A year ago, Obama won with a very big margin. He was talking about changing Bush’s policies of confrontation with Islam and the third world, and of containing China. However, today America is moving towards extreme rightism and racism. Obama’s popularity has taken a nose dive and there is great pressure on him to bring Bush’s policies back. At this time, it seems as if electing Obama was a part of the plan to pave the way for Sarah Palin to become President.

America’s confrontation with Islam, China, and the third world is growing. The situation in Afghanistan is becoming worse. America cannot find a way of getting out of Afghanistan before it becomes impossible to avoid a humiliating total defeat. America needs some face-saving excuse in Afghanistan just like in Iraq to avoid the impression that it was a complete loss. There is an expression in the Punjabi language that says that you need someone to put the dead snake around your neck on to his neck, in other words, you need somebody to dump your problems on. I feel that America is looking at India to take on that job.

A year ago, Obama seemed to be ignoring India because India did not fit in his policies. Bush had always looked at India as a very important ally against China, Islam, and the third world. India did not look important from that perspective to Obama. However, Obama is being forced to revert back to Bush’s policies. Therefore, India has become important for him also.

By inciting India to take an anti-China, anti-Islam, and anti-third world stand, America can meet several of its objectives. By promoting a conflict between India and China, both the countries can be prevented from achieving rapid economic growth and America can preserve its “Only superpower of the world” status. America sees both countries as potential challengers to its current status. If a war starts between India and Pakistan, then the anti-American sentiment among the Islamic world can be deflected to become anti-Indian sentiment. India should seriously ponder if America wants it to become America’s fall guy or a sacrificial lamb.

It is in India’s best interest to maintain peace and harmony in South Asia. The fundamental interests of the Indian people are identical to the fundamental interests of the people of Asia and the third world.

[The author is physician and Chairman, Washington State Network for Human Rights]

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