PM showmanship at its best to prove no farmers in distress

Known for his marketing expertise that even Congress President Rahul Gandhi acknowledged, Prime Minister Modi had a national televised "interactions" with the farmers on Wednesday through video conferencing that turned out to be a rehearsed affairs to use the farmers as props of the government's programmes, with not a slightest hint of distress.

The exchange that lasted nearly 90 minutes had the PM play as a moderator and commentator with a practised ease, summing up the interaction for the wider audience from the narrated examples, and gilded them with statistics, which he read out from an auto cue, about the progress that has been achieved in the past 4 years. The examples were edifying.

The farmers seemed to have reached the promised land in the past four years with an underlying message that it is only after Modi becoming the PM that the underdevelopment of the past six and a half decades was being tackled. There was no distress in the voices of the farmers.

A farmer from Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh was deftly cut off when he inserted a "but" into his narrative. Rajvinder Singh said he had 15 acres of land and was farming for 20 years. He had also leased an equal amount of land. On finding about three years ago that the water table was dipping, he went to a Krishi Vigyan Kendra for advice and decided to give up rice and wheat cultivation for watermelon and musk melon using a combination of drip irrigation and mulching (to prevent weed growth). His annual income had grown to? 15-20 lakh.

But when he said that his income was not steady because costs kept rising, the Prime Minister cut to another farmer from the state, a Muslim, who, to the immense gratification of the Prime Minister said he had visited “Gujarat Vibrant” (A Modi initiative as the CM) and saw "adverse condition farming" there. That inspired him to grow sugarcane in trenches interspersed with potato and vegetables.

The message that the PM sent out was clear that the rural distress seemed so easily curable.

This is not to say that the examples were unreal. It is just that the mix of farmers was not representative. Only the successes had been chosen but not those who had tried and struggled.

There were some useful messages. Neha Rathore, a young graduate woman farmer from Madhya Pradesh said her harvest of tomatoes from one hectare or 2.5 acres had increased from 500 quintals to 800 quintals with the use of drip irrigation.

There were other inspiring examples supporting integrated farming, fishery, poultry rearing, horticulture and organic farming. Some farmers had also benefited from crop insurance. Some answers were perhaps rehearsed because the person translating from Kannada gave more details than the farmers who did the talking, reminding one of a recent translation gaffe in Singapore involving the Prime Minister.

A woman from Sholapur said her all-woman farmer producer company was making dal and selling it under its own brand. But that is not the experience of pigeon pea (tur) farmers at large. Prices of pulses are ruling low. The government is unable to dispose of the pulses which it procured last year.

The programme presented a sanitised version of reality. The Prime Minister made laudatory references to the network of 550 regulated mandis which have gone online. He did not mention that in the absence of grading and sorting facilities, remote buyers could not be sure of the quality they were offered, and spot inspections were necessary.

Those watching the programme may not realise that the inter-mandi trading has not taken off in a big way. There was also resistance from commission agents to making online payments to farmers. With farmers borrowing from commission agents (who double up as moneylenders), they had no option but to sell soon after harvest, when prices are low.

The crop insurance scheme is also not working as it should. Technology was not being used to obviate costly and time-consuming crop cutting experiments. Claims were not being settled in time. States were not paying their share of the premiums on time, denying farmers compensation for say, prevented sowing due to late arrival of rains.

Farmers are producing enough and more but they are not getting remunerative prices. This is why 110 farmers’ organisation jointly went on strike earlier this month. Before that tribal farmers in Maharashtra went on a Long March on foot from Nashik to Mumbai. The television images were moving. But that doesn’t seem to be the picture of rural India the Prime Minster wishes to see.