With as many as 37 farmers committing suicide over the past few weeks in Maharashtra as unseasonal rain and hailstorms hit 28 of the State’s 35 districts, wiping out their crops and leaving them burdened with crippling debt, and Madhya Pradesh claiming that the rabi crop of 10,000 villages was similarly ruined in the same period, political parties need to rise above rivalries and find ways of mitigating the sufferings of victims of natural calamities or tragedies. Social activists warn that the Maharashtra toll could reach between 80 and 100 deaths, far above the average for every two months.
One way to stem the rising graph of farmer suicides is for the Election Commission to exempt such relief schemes from the purview of the Model Code of Conduct, with the proviso that no political party will use the humanitarian aid to garner votes during the election campaign. This can be made a violation of the code.
The relief can be announced and disbursed by the respective District Collectors without the involvement of politicians, so that the victims of such a catastrophe are not forced to suffer grim privation until the electoral process is over. Since political parties will not be able to take time off for an all-party meeting on the issue, an effective way would be to convey their assent to the President of India and the Election Commission.
The tragedy of farmers over the past month also calls for deeper solutions to the agrarian crisis in India. We need to seriously consider if farmers should mortgage their land to moneylenders or banks in lieu of loans, or if repayment should be mandated to a portion of the harvest – by law. It is the certainty that the entire family will be ruined because of crop failure and inability to repay loans that gives an edge to the farmers’ sense of failure and despair – and pushes him to suicide. The nation must take the edge off the farmers’ grief.
There has been a spate of farmer suicides in the Vidarbha and Marathwada regions, which have a troubled legacy of farmers’ suicides. The BJP leader Gopinath Munde asserts that the death toll so far is 37. Nearly 16 lakh hectares of crop valued at over Rs 5,000 crore has been ruined.
Activist Kishore Tiwari says that three days of unseasonal showers and hailstorms has damaged the horse-gram, wheat, jowar, tomato, brinjal crops along with the cereals and pulses; previous unseasonal showers ruined the soya-bean crop. The weather has hurt the livelihood of over four crore people. Also badly hit are the fruit crops such as pomegranate, grape, mango (all varieties except alphonso from Konkan), sweet lime, watermelon, papaya and bananas, which will affect their supply nationwide and could cost up to 30 per cent more.
Unnerved by the development, Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan on Wednesday urged farmers not to succumb to emotionalism and take extreme steps; he said the Government was committed to provide relief to them. While confirming 22 deaths, he admitted that more suicides were being reported. The Chief Minister claimed that since the model code of conduct is currently in force, the State Government would disburse aid and relief as per the standing instructions. He said that he had met Prime Minister and some other Union Ministers and sought aid to the tune of Rs 5000 crore for the farmers. He also met officials of the Election Commission and apprised them of the havoc wreaked in the state.
The Prime Minister has set up a high-level committee headed by Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, Sushil Kumar Shinde, P Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh and Montek S Ahluwalia to assess the damage.
While it would be unworthy to politicise any agrarian tragedy, it is pertinent that the tragedy of Maharashtra farmers is co-terminus with the calamity that has hit Madhya Pradesh and affected parts of Rajasthan. A Central team visited Maharashtra to evaluate the situation there, but the Centre has not responded to a demand for a Rs 5000 crore relief package for Madhya Pradesh, which forced Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to go on a four-hour long dharma in Bhopal on March 6.
Shivraj Singh Chouhan claimed that 49 districts were affected by the inclement weather and that, “The state government thinks this crisis is no less than a national calamity”. He has promised a Rs. 2,000 crore relief package for farmers wherein the regime would disburse compensation @Rs15000 per hectare of damaged crop. Farmers, however, fear that officials would delay the process and leave them to suffer. On his part, the Chief Minister has ordered that the survey of affected areas would not be conducted solely by the Revenue department, but by a joint team from the Revenue and Agriculture departments. The district collectors have been directed to ensure that the survey is conducted fairly and timely.
In Rajasthan, the weather has ravaged the rapeseed crop in Ajmer and Jaipur regions; this was expected to be a bumper crop this year. The chickpea and red gram has also been hit. In Uttar Pradesh, the potato crop has been damaged, according o the National Horticulture Research and Development Foundation.
The Congress is nervous because farmers in Vidarbha have threatened to exercise the NOTA (None Of The Above) option during the election if aid is not given before April 10. The State votes on April 10, 17, and 24. They are also likely to make some specific demands when the BJP Prime Ministerial nominee Narendra Modi discusses the agrarian crisis in India in a ‘Chai pe Charcha ‘meeting at Wardha on Thursday. The situation in Vidarbha is very tense and there are reports that some of the farmers were so acutely depressed that they went and hanged themselves publicly in the main village square.
The Opposition Shiv Sena has accused the Congress-NCP coalition of using the Model Code of Conduct as an excuse for inaction when people are dying. Vidarbha is Maharashtra’s ‘suicide country’; till two years ago there were reports of a farmer suicide every eight hours.
Maharashtra ranks among the five States with the highest number of farmer suicides from 1995 to 2011. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) states that the total number of farmer suicides in India in this period reached a staggering 2,70, 940 out of which 54,000 were in Maharashtra. In 2011 alone, there were 3,337 farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra as against 3,141 the previous year (and 2,872 in 2009). Observers point out that this was despite heavy ‘massaging’ of data at the State level for several years, including re-defining the term “farmer”.
Niticentral.com, 19 March 2014