The solution to the farm impasse lies in federalism
India must break out of the cycle where states escape their responsibilities and the Centre then pushes in, accumulating more power in the process. Let states take ownership of state subjects
T he current imbroglio over the farm laws highlights the Centre’s growing intrusion into what are constitutionally state subjects. But they also highlight another uncomfortable reality. Many of the most serious economic afflictions facing the country — agriculture, water, power, land, health and education — are state subjects. And the failures of the states to do justice on subjects that are well within their constitutional obligations have created space for an activist Centre to weigh in.
Take power. The bleeding of the distribution companies (discoms) has had enormous opportunity costs for state finances. The attempts to stem the bleeding are a veritable alphabet soup – the Accelerated Power Development and Reform Programme (APDRP), the restructured-APDRP, Integrated Power Development Scheme, Financial Restructuring Plan and Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY). But, despite the enormous resources poured into them, their impact is, at best, modest and, at worst, an abject failure. The Fifteenth Finance Commission (FFC) has once again attempted to clean the Augean stables of state power finances by recommending extra annual borrowing space based on certain performance criteria in the power sector. Hope springs eternal.
Take another example. “Public Order” and “Police” fall under the “State List” of the Seventh Schedule, putting the onus on state governments for the maintenance of the law and order in their respective states. In 1999, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs (chaired by late President Pranab Mukherjee) observed that “of late the dependence of State Governments, all over, on the Central Para Military Forces in dealing with difficult situations arising on the law and order front has increased significantly… This changing trend over the years has given rise to a situation of dichotomy wherein while on the one hand the State Governments tend to demand more and more power and autonomy, on the other hand they appear to be prepared very inadequately to perform..one of the most primary duties of maintaining law and order and peace and normalcy in their respective State. On every incident of minor or major proportion they tend to seek help of the central police forces, which only throw poor light on the preparedness of their police forces in dealing with adverse situations.”
Little has changed. Over the past two decades, even as the states continued to underinvest in their police, the size of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) doubled, thereby ensuring the creeping federalisation of a state subject.
The story is similar in agriculture. For the vast majority of India’s farmers, the tiny size of their farms means that there is simply no way they can make a decent income on farming alone unless their incomes are artificially boosted by a plethora of input subsidies, price or income supports — or if they are part of the privileged few who have large farms. All the policy options being debated and passed as saviours are — for the vast majority of farmers — “post-dated check on a crashing bank”, as Gandhi once said of a British proposal.
The only viable long-term answer for the majority of India’s farmers, as BR Ambedkar observed a century ago, is to get out of farming. At that time, India’s population was a fifth of what it is today and land fragmentation correspondingly less. Public policies of input subsidies (especially on fertilisers and water) that underpinned the Green Revolution certainly benefited the country broadly, in terms of both aggregate output as well as farmer incomes. But their sell-by date is well-past. Once farm incomes rose, the rural surplus should have provided the springboard for structural transformation, especially in industry. Instead, it has become a trap slowly asphyxiating the sector.
The basic thrust of the farm laws was in the right direction. But their specific details and the manner in which it was done without broad deliberation and building consensus — let alone the manner in which the government has lashed out at critics — has been completely self-defeating. Public policies need to have broad legitimacy among those that it affects and the reality is that these farm laws simply don’t.
A way out of this turmoil might lie in respecting India’s federalism more fully. The Centre should not pass farm laws that affect agriculture markets within states, but this should also mean no central govern
ment Minimum Support Price (MSP) and no central government procurement. The states say that agriculture is a state subject. It is. And they should have complete say in what subsidies they want to give their farmers, for which crop, and how. The states that strongly believe in MSP and procurement should have complete ownership of both.
The Centre’s involvement in procurement today is inextricably linked to its obligations under the Right to Food Act. That Act had the right intentions but its cereal obsessiveness is having deeply damaging consequences for agriculture and agro-ecology. As FFC notes, within agriculture, the more the government intervention, the lower the growth. Crops, especially cereals, are lavished with subsidies while fisheries, livestock and horticulture have grown much faster — and are more nutritious.
The Centre should move to replace the Act with a Right to Nutrition Act that eschews specifying the exact cereal and instead offers broad nutritional guarantees from a basket specific to different regional contexts. That change will take time. Until then, the Centre should buy, in the open market, the rice and wheat needed for the public distribution system after the kharif
and rabi harvests and maintain buffer stocks for price stabilisation. If states think that the private sector will be exploitative, they can and should do their own procurement. It is only then that they will think hard about crops and costs.
The Centre’s involvement in agriculture markets should be to smoothen pan-India commerce — no state should be able to block inter-state movement of a commodity. For its part, the Centre should not be able to ban agriculture exports if prices rise. Why should farmers not get the upside of prices when they have to suffer the downside when prices go down? If the government is worried about consumer reaction, it should either compensate farmers commensurately or subside the consumer directly, but not force the farmer to do so. And if agriculture is truly to be a state subject, either the Agriculture Infrastructure and Development Cess (AIDC) in the new budget should be discontinued or whatever money is raised should be handed over to the states.
But all this cannot be done overnight. There needs to be an exit ramp for farmers and states to adjust. Here, the Centre should provide a clear road map along with performance-based incentive financing to ease
the transition over three to four years.
The farm laws are illustrative of an uncomfortable reality. There are many important issues that states are fully empowered to handle. But they don’t. Problems arise. Then there is a clamour that “the government” should do more. But, inevitably, that means the central government. Of course, the Centre loves this, because it then exercises more power. And that has slowly, but surely, tilted the already imbalanced Union-state relationship even more in favour of the former.
The best bulwark against a hegemonic Centre is stronger federalism. But, for that to occur, states will have to up their game. Fundamentally, unless they bite the bullet and move to develop their non-farm sectors, most farmers will have increasingly precarious livelihoods. And the Centre can best help farmers by assisting states make that transition.
Ankita Raina’s journey is likely to resonate with the average Indian child hoping to grow into a professional sportsperson. Raina was not a wunderkind or teen sensation; merely a hardworking player drawing on every ounce of talent and clambering, one step at a time, to the elite level. And now there she is: at the Australian Open, making her Grand Slam debut in doubles last week at the age of 28, after nine shots at qualifying in singles and at least a decade on the professional circuit. Raina is only the fifth Indian woman in the Open Era, and the first since Sania Mirza’s debut in 2005 to play a Grand Slam main draw match.
She lost in the opening round with first-time partner Mihaela Buzarnescu, but the unexpected Slam entry via doubles has reiterated India’s No 1 women’s player’s belief of fulfilling her primary goal — to play singles at the Slams.
“The first thing that came to my mind was — finally it has happened,” Raina says, speaking from
Melbourne, of the moment she learnt about her Slam debut. “I began thinking of all the sacrifices that my family has made.”
Growing up in a middle-class household in Ahmedabad, Raina was introduced to tennis at the age of four. She loved the game, and soon enough, became very good at playing it, excelling in U-12 and U-14 national- and Asia-level tournaments.
Realising their daughter’s potential, Raina’s parents — her mother, Lalita Raina, is an employee with the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) while her father, Ravinderkrishan Raina, works with a pharmaceutical company — shifted the family to Pune so she could enrol in the Hemant Bendrey Tennis Academy at the age of 14.
Bendrey, a well-known Indian tennis coach, saw a rare temperament in Raina. “Kids at that age often cry for days after losing. Ankita would cry for that one day, but would come back to the court the next day with the same enthusiasm,” Bendrey says. Also, she was always turning up at 7.30 am for training sessions that started at 8.30.
Bendrey believes he has coached youngsters more talented than Raina, some of whom even played the juniors at Wimbledon, but then faded away. “This girl wanted to keep going. She had that persistence, and she survived,” he says.
Survived. Succeeded.
Since turning pro in
2009, Raina has won 11 singles and 19 doubles titles on the ITF (International Tennis Federation) circuit, a rung below the elite WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) level. Since her maiden ITF triumph in 2011, she has won at least one title every year save 2015.
Raina broke into the Top 200 of world rankings in 2018, won the country a bronze medal at the 2018 Asian Games and played a key role in India earning a maiden playoffs spot in the Fed Cup (now the Billie Jean King Cup) last March.
On Friday, the current world No 181 in singles and 115 in doubles pocketed her maiden WTA Tour title, winning the Phillip Island Trophy doubles crown in Melbourne partnering Russia’s Kamilla Rakhimova. The triumph should propel her into the Top 100 of the doubles rankings. In singles at WTA tournaments, she stunned 2011 US Open champion Samantha Stosur at the 2019 Kunming Open and beat 126ranked Elisabetta Cocciaretto at the Phillip Island Trophy. Raina will now seek a similar deep run in singles.
Meanwhile, she continues to travel alone, as she has done since she was 12, sorting out her bookings, food and tournament schedules. She has seldom been able to afford a travelling coach or trainer. Raina remembers struggling with the food and language in China and panicking when she, then 14, missed her stop on a long-distance train in Morocco.
“I had to pull the chain to stop the train,” she says, laughing. “But such experiences gave me the extra edge to be mentally stronger, which helped me on court. Right now if I see a 12- or 14-year-old Indian girl travelling alone, I do wonder how I did it!”
Her attitude to losses remains the same. Her goal seems, first, to make it onto the court. Second, to give it her all while she’s there. “In tennis, you compete every week, so you are going to lose a lot of matches,” she says. “But you have to get up the next day and do the process again. Regardless of how long the wait will be. The journey has been great so far. But it’s not complete. I’m still waiting for a singles Grand Slam main draw. I’m sure it’s coming.”
Can tech fill the gap in the fitness space created by the pandemic? Across most of India, people are still wary of returning to the gyms and swimming pools, yoga sessions are off the table and Zumba classes on indefinite hold.
Digital offerings have multiplied in response — gyms have launched online tutorials, trainers have begun to conduct Zumba classes on Zoom, there are meditation sessions being held via Facebook Lives. These online options offer greater variety and convenience, and the prices tend to be lower than for a similar session in a brickand-mortar space, but virtual sessions can’t really substitute for the real thing, says Karan Valecha, director of Gold’s Gym India, which
went entirely online for the first time in its 18 years.
“With fitness being digitised, there are the problems of information overload and tech fatigue, with a confusing array of options and people not knowing which ones are reliable,” Valecha says. “Most importantly, there is the lack of external push or peer motivation.”
Motivation is a key difference, say fitness enthusiasts who’ve swapped the gym for a virtual platform.
“It feels more boring online, many of my customers have told me,” says Kishor Sadashiv More, 38, a fitness trainer in Mumbai. “Keeping fit digitally leaves you with a sense of isolation. The motivation of watching another person doing the same exercise or yoga positions is missing. It’s also difficult to teach people to fix a mistake or correct their posture if you’re interacting with them virtually.”
Even for a relatively solitary exercise like meditation, says Nehal Modi, 39, a wellness enthusiast and digital marketing executive in Delhi, getting together on a Facebook Live felt awkward. It didn’t help that there were technical glitches, and not everyone could find a quiet corner in their homes. “But over time we got used to the new format and it works for me,” Modi says.
The general consensus is that a virtual routine is preferable to having no fitness routine, or running a risk by trying to revert to a pre-pandemic one.
“Covid-19 has also made more people aware of their comorbidities — be it obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol or high blood pressure,” says Tushar Vashisht, co-founder and CEO of the fitness app HealthifyMe. “Many of our new users say they had never signed up for a gym before.”