‘Advani opted out of poll race’
NEW DELHI: A decision to field Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah from Gandhinagar in Gujarat was taken after veteran Lal Krishna Advani told the party leadership he was unwilling to contest the Aprilmay parliamentary election, a person familiar with the issue said.
“Advani told the party threefour days back that he will not contest,” added this person who is close to the BJP leader and who did not wish to be identified. “Once he communicated that decision to the party, it was up to them to decide who it wanted to field.”
The BJP released its first list of 184 candidates for the Lok Sabha election on Thursday, and dropped many leaders over the age of 75 from the list. Garhwal MP BC Khanduri (84), Nanital MP Bhagat Singh Koshyari (76) and Guwahati MP Bijoya Chakravarty (79) were prominent omissions in the BJP list. Advani is 91.
“His decision to not contest the Lok Sabha election means he is retiring,” the person cited in the first instance said, adding that there has been no talk yet of sending Advani to the Rajya Sabha.
To a question on whether Advani was denied a ticket, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley said at a press conference, “The party takes a decision through its internal mechanism on such matters. All party leaders, especially those are very senior and have built the party, are part of this system. Therefore the usage of words like ‘denied’ is not appropriate.”
Advani’s decision to not contest the election marks the end of an illustrious chapter in the history of India’s ruling party, which grew in size and strength after Advani took out the rath yatra in 1990s, mustering support to build a Ram Temple at Ayodhya.
Advani was elected to the Rajya Sabha for four terms and to the Lok Sabha on seven occasions. He was country’s deputy prime minister, held key portfolio such as Home Ministry and headed the BJP several times.
Advani was BJP’S first ‘Hindu hriday samrat’, and his hardline stance won him followers across country, helped firm up his grip over the BJP, and won him many admirers in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – the BJP’S ideological mentor.
In sharp contrast to former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Advani was a man of the organization who handpicked and patronized several BJP leaders for key roles.
Many second generation leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, were considered his protégé. It is widely believed that it was Advani’s backing that saved Modi’s job as Gujarat chief minister after the Gujarat riots in 2002.
WHERE ARE WE TODAY?
Policy makers and the public need to recognise four key facts about Indian agriculture. First, productivity per worker is abysmally low. India produces 300 million tons of cereals with 275 million cultivators and agricultural labourers. For comparison, the US produces 475 million tons of cereals with 8 million cultivators, agricultural labourers, and seasonal workers. Thus, per worker agricultural productivity in the US is around 50 times greater than in India, consistent with recent research estimating that agricultural output per worker in rich countries is 30 to 50 times higher than in poor countries. Reasons include very small plot sizes, inadequate public investments in research and irrigation, and limited mechanisation and technology adoption.
Second, value addition in Indian agriculture is low, especially for small farmers. Systematic analysis is limited by the lack of data, and the difficulty of measuring and valuing farmer’s labour on their own farms. However, recent estimates from an ongoing study are illustrative. Nicholas Ryan (Yale University) and Anant Sudarshan (University of Chicago) measured farmer profits and inputs used in Rajasthan in the 2017 Rabi season, and find that even with all government subsidies on electricity, fertilizer, and seeds, and valuing the cost of farmer time at zero, 17% of farmers made a loss. If the costs of inputs are calculated correctly at
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
While there are several reasons for this gradually-building crisis, an important one is that the budget for Indian agriculture is spent quite badly — mainly on subsidies, price supports, and loan waivers. Subsidies and minimum support prices (MSP) may have made sense in the 1960s when India was responding to a food crisis, and needed to achieve national self-sufficiency in food production. However, 50 years later, these same policies now contribute to the agrarian crisis we are in. There are several reasons for this.
First, while these policies help
farmers in the short-term, they limit fiscal space for productivityimproving public investments. The huge gaps in per-worker productivity noted above can be partly attributed to the cumulative effective of such underinvestment over time. Second, these policies induce and reward inefficient consumption, and contribute to the increasing unsustainability of Indian agriculture. For instance, free electricity for farmers encourages groundwater depletion, the structure of fertilizer subsidies contributes to systematic overuse of urea and a long-term decline in soil quality, and minimum support prices and procurement for rice, wheat, and sugarcane (combined with other subsidies) induce their cultivation in suboptimal areas and reduce diversification of crops.
HOW DO WE MOVE FORWARD?
The discussion above highlights that India needs a structural transformation that improves agricultural productivity per worker and frees up farmers to shift to higher-earning occupations. This will require shifting public funds away from subsidies, MSP increases, and loan waivers, and using those funds for productivity-enhancing investments, increased research