A looming emergency
Piecemeal solutions won’t solve Maharashtra’s farm crisis
The nearly-200-km farmers’ Nashik-to-Mumbai march may have ended on Monday with the Maharashtra government offering a seemingly amicable resolution to the protestors, but there are some significant fallacies that policy makers must caution themselves against. The first is the perception that the agrarian crisis in the state is restricted to loan waivers; and second, that the resentment is monolithic. Thousands of farmers from Nashik and the surrounding areas marched to the legislative headquarters to demand fair allocation of forest land, a minimum support price that is one and a half times that of the production cost, and waiving of pending energy bills. However, the concerns of Nashik’s farmers are not the same as those from Vidarbha and Marathwada.
The state’s farmers have voiced issues similar to those from the rest of the country; only the magnitude and the specifics differ. Data released by the Census of India proves that Dalit farmers are not likely to benefit from farm reforms announced as the policies are aimed at owners of farm lands, rather than the agricultural labour force. More than 70% of agricultural labourers are in debt. Consequently, the suicide rate among them is higher as they do not have access to the formal loan economy, which land owners do. Maharashtra has other problems, too: over-dependence on the monsoon, the lack of redress mechanisms, a massive pest outbreak that has destroyed the cotton crop, and the inconsistencies in the disbursal of farm loan waivers.
It is for all these reasons that no state can pacify protesting farmers through loan waivers. Besides, waivers have a significant impact on a state’s economy. This is exactly what happened to Maharashtra this year, when the state government presented a budget that has no new turnkey project despite the promises made over the last year. The solution offered to farmers on Monday is welcome, but it is, like previous solutions, piecemeal. There is an urgent need for Maharashtra to address the looming emergency in the farm sector, and it is a crisis that won’t go away with knee-jerk and reactionary responses.