The Hindu Business Line : Good luck, Mr Sharad Pawar

Mr Sharad Pawar has vast administrative experience as a former Chief Minister of Maharashtra and Defence Minister at the Centre. If he is serious about increasing private investment in agriculture, Mr Pawar must reform the agricutural marketing system and restore property rights, at least for the farmers.

MR SHARAD Pawar is the new Minister for Agriculture and Food at the Centre. It is a personal compliment to him that, probably for the first time in 40 years, a minister has been entrusted with the portfolios of both Agriculture and Food.

When his predecessor, Mr Rajnath Singh, took over, he had contacted a number of knowledgeable people for advice on what could be the elements of a crash programme for agricultural development that would produce quick results — quick enough to show before the advent of the 2004 general elections.

What Mr Rajnath Singh could actually put into effect was, obviously, far from enough. The agricultural situation worsened in a number of States because of severe drought. The consequence was that the NDA Government lost the battle at the hustings and it was widely recognised that the rebuff was principally a rural reaction to the largely urban-oriented `India Shining' campaign.

On the eve of his swearing in, the new Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, spelt out his priorities and emphasised the need for a big push to agriculture.

Mr Sharad Pawar's appointment as Agriculture and Food Minister in a situation of agricultural anguish is a historical parallel to Yashwantrao Chavan — Mr Pawar's mentor — being called to take over as Minister of Defence at the end of the Chinese crisis in the 1960s. But while Chavan was a novice in Defence matters, Mr Pawar is said to be knowledgeable in agricultural matters and a champion of the cooperative movement. He does not need any `running in' and has given the impression of getting cracking from Day One.

Mr Pawar has another advantage. All agriculture ministers from the South of the Narmada have given good accounts of themselves in the past — Panjabrao Deshmukh, Annasaheb Shinde and C. Subramaniam, for instance.

Further, Mr Pawar has vast administrative experience as a former Chief Minister of Maharashtra and Defence Minister at the Centre. He has to his credit several achievements in Maharashtra, particularly in horticulture development and the working of the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS).

Agriculture is a difficult ministry in the United Progressive Alliance Government. The UPA's major constituent, the Congress party, has a long history of giving priority to infrastructure and technology relating to agriculture, almost to the detriment of economic incentives. Successive Congress governments have used the Essential Commodities Act, export restrictions and imports (in the nature of dumping) to depress agricultural prices.

The cooperative, credit, transport and marketing infrastructure, built up with great effort, is rapidly crumbling and India finds itself facing the challenges and opportunities of the era of globalisation and frontier technologies with a largely impoverished peasantry, driven to large-scale suicides under the crushing burden of indebtedness. The Left Front element of the UPA has its own understanding of the farm scenario. The Left has always treated the problem of rural poverty as one of exploitation of landless labourers by rural moneylenders and landlords. For them, land reforms — meaning redistribution of land in favour of the landless and improvement of the working conditions and enhancing the wages of hired labour have been the twin instruments of rural policy. These two programmes are to be achieved, according to the Leftist view, while keeping agricultural prices depressed.

One can see the Left influence clearly in the UPA's Common Minimum Programme (CMP). Fortunately, there is also a realisation that the policies calculated to depress agricultural prices need to be systematically eliminated.

Mr Pawar's position on economic reforms is far from equivocal. When Dr Manmohan Singh made the historical shift to liberalisation, Mr Pawar is known to have written a three-page long letter opposing the reforms. But with the reforms here to stay, he used the reform idiom in appropriate circles, though launching anti-globalisation tirades before other audiences.

As Agriculture Minister, Mr Pawar will have to take a clear position on the question of liberalisation, globalisation and technology.

The UPA's Common Minimum Programme has picked up Mr Pawar's favourite hobby-horse of the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS). He knows that the EGS has produced few tangible assets and has often had been a hotbed of corruption and an undesirable influence on the rural labour market. His new friends in the Left may well try to sell him the EGS programme by showering praise on him as the ``father of the EGS''. He needs, therefore, to take stock of certain unsavoury aspects of the EGS in planning its extension. This might invoke the wrath of some of his former colleagues but that has never bothered the Maratha strongman.

Mr Pawar has been a champion of a number of measures restricting agricultural commodity trade, transport and processing. He has presided over the Maharashtra Cotton Monopoly Procurement Scheme as also the sugar cooperative empire of Maharashtra.

He has also defended the sugar barons of Maharashtra when they pleaded inability to pay even the Statutory Minimum Price (SMP) to the sugarcane growers.

Mr Pawar was the author of the idea of the State fixing a maximum cane price that was much lower than the Central government's SMP. He had initiated proposals for various deductions from the sugarcane bills of the farmers on accounts of contribution to various trusts, the chief minister's fund, refundable and non-refundable deposits, and so on.

When in 1980, the farmers agitated for a remunerative price for sugarcane and set in motion competition among cooperative sugar barons for giving higher prices, Mr Pawar introduced zonal restrictions on cane movement to keep cane prices depressed.

If the new Agriculture Minister is serious about increasing private investment in agriculture, he will need to abandon the principle of `eminence juries' and restore property rights, at least for the farmers.The cooperative sugar factories of Maharashtra are on the brink of bankruptcy. A few of them can be salvaged; the others will have to be allowed to sink. Those were the ones started with little economic justification through licences that Mr Pawar helped procure.

Anybody with minimum political pull had only to gather the basic seed share capital to get nine times that amount to play around with. The plant and machinery of the sugar factory was Rs 2 crore in 1956-60; Rs 3.5 crore in 1960-70; Rs 5 crore in 1970-80 and Rs 20 crore in 1980 for crushing capacity of 1250-2500 tonnes of sugarcane per season. Mr Pawar will have to get rid of these unpleasant bogeys of the past if he seriously entertains the ambition to become, as so many hoardings in Mumbai proclaim, `a national leader of farmers'. The ambition of becoming prime minister, which he recently gave up, was much less pretentious.

The Agriculture Produce Marketing Committees (APMCs) have ceased to be a farmer-friendly mechanism. Few know better than Mr Pawar the devious ways in which the lands acquired for the APMCs were diverted for the benefit of local chieftains. Reform of agricultural marketing will hurt many, but that is a price he must be prepared to pay if he wants to go down in history as an outstanding Minister for Agriculture on a par with Panjabrao Deshmukh, if not C. Subramaniam.

Mr Pawar has all things going for him in his new task as farm minister. He can use this opportunity to introspect, take stock of the situation and begin afresh.

(The author is founder, Shetkari Sanghatana. He can be reached at sharad@mah.nic.in)

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