INDIAN FARMERS FLOOD INTO MUMBAI TO DEMAND REDRESS
▶ Crippling debt one of the main issues affecting agriculture in Maharashtra state
Almost 50,000 farmers marched from rural Maharashtra into the city of Mumbai yesterday to protest against the government’s failure to fix an agricultural crisis.
They began walking six days ago from Nashik, 180 kilometres outside Mumbai, and entered the city in near-silence early yesterday morning.
As the light grew over the city, the marchers, holding up banners of various unions and communist parties, resembled a river of red flowing along the Eastern Express Highway.
By 7am the farmers had reached Azad Maidan, an open space in south Mumbai.
Their pre-dawn entry into the city had been timed to minimise traffic disruptions for commuters, a representative of the All Indian Kisan Sabha farmers’ union told the news channel NDTV.
In the afternoon, a 12-member delegation of farmers met Maharashtra’s Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis, who assured them his government would start to meet their demands within two months.
“We’re positive in fulfilling demands,” Mr Fadnavis said on Twitter. He claimed that his government had tried to start negotiations with the farmers after they set out from Nashik, “but they were firm on taking out the march”.
Maharashtra’s farm sector production grew by 22.5 per cent in 2016-2017, but last year it shrank by 8.3 per cent because of poor rains and an infestation of pink bollworm.
The farmers are also complaining that the government’s minimum price for which it buys grains and other produce is too low, and that their land rights are often infringed on or neglected.
The crop failures last year were part of a larger pattern of hardship for Maharashtra’s farmers. At least half of the state’s agricultural households are in debt, and there have been many cases of farmers killing themselves when unable to repay their loans. Last year, Maharashtra registered 2,414 farmer suicides between January and October.
The pattern repeats itself around the country. About 263 million Indians work in agriculture as farmers or labourers, and 600 million people rely on the sector for their livelihood.
The average monthly income of a farming household is 6,426 rupees (Dh363), but the average debt for each household is 47,000 rupees.
In 2016, a year with abundant rainfall, 11,458 farmers killed themselves across India – the lowest figure in nearly two decades.
Last year, Maharashtra provided a limited waiver of loans, relieving each farmer of up to 150,000 rupees of debt. The cost to the treasury was estimated to be about 340 million rupees.
But Ashok Dhawale, the president of the farmers’ union, said yesterday that introducing the waiver had been patchy. Among the farmers’ demands is full loan relief, without a 150,000-rupee ceiling.
Mr Dhawale said farmers wanted the government to stop acquiring agricultural land for “fancy and elitist projects”, such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s beloved bullet-train link, and to increase crop support prices.
He said farmers from Maharashtra’s indigenous tribes, who often have no formal title to land on which they have lived for centuries, were being displaced.
The government “should vest land in the names of the tribals, who have been cultivating it for several generations”, Mr Dhawale said.
Once Mr Fadnavis’s government made its promises, the farmers prepared to leave the city on trains arranged by the government.
Dozens of Mumbai residents had turned out to show support for them as they marched through Mumbai in the morning, offering them biscuits, dates and water.
Many of the farmers were barefoot, said Nitin Rane, a university student who joined his sister in handing out paper cups of water.
“At the time I didn’t fully understand what the protest was about,” Mr Rane said. “After I came home, I read the papers and got a better sense of it and I hope the government helps the farmers out.
“Somewhere today I read this sentence about the farmers – that these are the people who feed us, and so we should be happy to feed them as well. It’s important for India that its farmers do well.”