It's time Maharashtra BJP government stops taking farmers for fools
What I want to say can be summed up in one line - Maharashtra faces a serious agrarian crisis. The current scenario in the state reflects a bitter reality the BJP government wouldn't want the country to know. As nature continues to test farmers across the state, the government is making it worse by failing to keep its promises.
Let's start with the government's promise to procure tur dal from farmers. In October 2017, the agriculture ministry announced the minimum support price (MSP) for rabi (winter) crops to encourage farmers to bring a major part of their land under cultivation.
With the MSP hiked up to Rs 5,500 per tonne from Rs 5,000 per tonne at the time of procurement, farmers were told the hike of Rs 500 is an incentive. However, the government's job seems to have ended with making lofty promises. For the MSP mechanism to work, a complete machinery has to be available in the villages to procure tur dal and to ensure a certain quality is also maintained. Side by side, farmers need to be paid on time.
Before the MSP was announced, the State Farmers Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC) was procuring the produce. In Maharashtra specifically, it was being done by the Maharashtra Farmers Producing Companies Consortium on behalf of the SFAC. Since October the state government and NAFED have taken over saying the SFAC does not have the adequate infrastructure. The fact is that many officials and middlemen who made money in this process do not want to have an efficient system of procurement.
I fail to understand why an organisation that was successfully working at the village level has been stopped from doing it. The government wants every farmer to register and has put a ceiling of three acres per farmer.
Of the 25,000 farmers who had registered for their tur dal produce to be procured, merely 2,000 have managed to sell their produce in over four months. The rest live in constant fear of their produce rotting as they wait for the government to get its act together. Coupled with this delay is the fact that the price of tur dal in the private market is much less than the MSP and a farmer who needs cash might have to do a distress sale and end up accruing huge losses. A classic case of "maximum announcements" and "minimum governance".
Failure in procuring tur dal unfortunately is just one of the many reasons why we face an agrarian crisis.
The second and an even bigger problem is the failed promise of the Rs 34,000 crore loan waiver promised by the government for 89 lakh farmers. After a cumbersome, online process by the state's IT Department only 77 lakh were able to submit online applications. After what was a paperwork nightmare for farmers, only 47.73 lakh farmers were shortlisted of an original claim of the loan benefitting 89 lakh farmers.
Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis in a public statement promised that the loan would be disbursed by December 2017. As of January 24, loan worth Rs 12,362 crore was waived off for 31 lakh farmers. Who should the remaining 16 lakh farmers turn to for help if not the government? In the meantime, 2017 incidentally has seen one of the highest numbers of farmer suicides in recent years. Yes, one thing the government did. It installed nylon safety nets at the Mantralaya do avoid the embarrassment of a desperate farmer attempting to commit suicide from the building.
If all this wasn't enough to drive the farmers to desperation, nature has added to their woes. One such unfortunate incident hit Vidarbha and central Maharashtra on February 11, 2018. Untimely rains and hailstorm destroyed crops worth crores. Nature's fury affected more than 1,000 villages across 11 districts in Maharashtra.
As per the criteria of the NDRF (National Disaster Response Fund), the farmers should receive a maximum compensation of Rs 18,000 per hectare. But the reality narrates a different tale. As the farmers continue to struggle to make ends meet after the hailstorm, the government authorities are still stuck with preparing ground reports and post-mortem of the dead cattle. The farmers are being humiliated as they are forced to hold a slate with their name in their hands and stand right in the middle of their destroyed fields to get clicked for the ground reports. Even if documentation and procedures are of utmost importance to the ggovernment, insensitivity of the government is unacceptable.
The government's apathy can be measured by the statement of the state education minister Vinod Tawde.
In a remarkable display of insensitivity, Tawde said that farmers want everything for free. The irony is not lost on us - those who owe the bank millions and those who defraud the banks seem to be getting away. But our farmers are being hauled for loans worth a few lakhs and the government chooses to look the other way.
During the Budget speech promises of "lakhpati farmers" were made as also making MSP 50 per cent of the cost price. All these promises fast seem to be turning into nothing but jumlas.