The Hindu Business Line : Needed, an exit policy for agriculture

The exodus of farmers from the villages to the cities, happening for decades, worsened in the last 15 years, when a lakh and a half peasants decided to end their lives. A policy to rehabilitate farmers in better-paying vocations and admit those with better financial and technical abilities is needed.

Those dependent on agriculture for their livelihood should have the option of a way out.

Sharad Joshi

The title of this article may shock many readers. An exit policy for agriculture? Are not the farmers born farmers and do they not die as farmers? Farmers do exit agriculture. But that is only when they are forced to do so by drought or famine or when their land is taken over by the government for some kind of non-agricultural project.

Farmers who find it impossible to make a living by agriculture are thronging the cities in search of livelihoods. In the 1920s and 1930s they housed themselves in chawls constructed by the municipal bodies or by the textile mills in Mumbai.

In the 1930s and 1940s, they settled down in tin-sheet chawls. After Independence, they found shelter in the squalor of sprawling slums. Howsoever dire the living conditions in the cities, life there was much better than starvation in the home village.

The second generation of the refugee farmers did better and got themselves not only some smattering of education but even jobs that allowed them, if they wished, to help out the kith and kin who could not escape the burden of agriculture in the villages.

An objective study shows that all those who left agriculture and came to the cities did better than they ever hoped to do as farmers. Farmers displaced by the early irrigation dams, railways and industries constructed during the British rule, all experienced the torment of being uprooted, excruciating nostalgia and the transitional problems so common to all diaspora.

However, over time, they settled down and hardly ever regretted having abandoned farming and the village.

It is really surprising that many a leader of the displaced people does not realise this objective reality and insists on demanding replacement plans for the displaced people where they will be doomed to die miserably.

Entry policy too

The exodus from the countryside to the fast expanding cities continued without any kind of a policy — no voluntary retirement scheme (VRS), no pensions and no golden handshake. They were simply booted out by the moneylenders, by the officials of the co-operative banks, by the rigours of drought or floods.

The time has come to have a well-worked-out exit policy for the agriculture in India for the farmer. A recent survey conducted by the Planning Commission revealed that over 40 per cent of the practicing farmers did not wish to continue in agriculture.

In the last 13 years, over 1,30,000 farmers indicated their unwillingness to practice agriculture by simply exiting the world. An exit policy should not only include such important concerns but also chalk out elements of an entry policy.

Every now and then, we hear stories of people who have the necessary financial strength and the managerial ability and capacity to handle complex technologies trying unsuccessfully to get into agriculture and being repulsed as if they presented an invasion into the sacred territory of cultivators.

Harsher realities

Agriculture in the coming decades is going to face harsher realities than it has ever known earlier.

Global warming and the phenomenon of climate change are expected to make food-grains farming, in the scorching heat under the sky, practically impossible. Major food-grain crops, such as wheat, may become feasible only in cold or temperate countries.

In countries such as India, cultivation of wheat will be conceivable only if biotechnology provides a new generation of seeds that can withstand extremes of temperature and vicissitudes of precipitation.

The dairy industry will be adversely affected by the fact that crossbred cows from temperate countries will simply not be able to survive the temperatures in the neighbourhood of 45-48°C.

Wastage of agricultural produce might expand as the food processing based on the traditional cooling and refrigeration technology will attract the wrath of the environmentalists. A new food processing technology like “high-pressure technology” that removes microbes is yet in a very nascent stage. Similarly, aeroponics and hydroponics are beyond the reach of the practising farmer.

To add to the misery of the farmer, particularly those cultivating in dryland areas, electricity is simply not available in the countryside for most of the days. The present pump-sets are difficult to work because of the rise in diesel prices. The farmer who is a farmer only because he was born a farmer is beginning to ask himself whether he must die as a farmer.

The fast growth of industries is making the cost of agricultural land skyrocket. In a single generation, land prices have gone up as much as a hundred times. Is this not the right time to bring about a flushing of the agricultural population, rehabilitating the traditional farmer in vocations that are better paying and admitting new entrants who have more appropriate managerial, financial and technological abilities?

The traditional picture of the farmer as an ill-clad, emaciated person in poor health is changing, but at an imperceptible speed, in an excruciatingly slow and painful manner. It is necessary to bring about the transition in a systematic manner in order to usher in the new era of, “covered agriculture”, biotechnology and aeroponics that can find markets with the help of the information technology.

This is also necessary for reducing the proportion of the population dependent on agriculture and bringing about the second “Green Revolution” that everybody, from the Prime Minister to the President, has been talking about.

(The author is Founder, Shetkari Sanghatana and Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha. blfeedback@thehindu.co.in)

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