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Losing hope

More than 125 farmers have committed suicide in Vidarbha since the announcement of the Rs.60,000 crore farm loan waiver. Clearly, the demoralisation and despair that have gripped the benighted region are of extraordinary proportions. That the waiver itself would have a marginal impact on Vidarbha was predictable and indeed predicted by this newspaper’s Rural Affairs Editor. It was clear that the waiver’s failure to touch moneylender debt and its cut-off limit of two hectares would let down these dryland farmers terribly. Now even official figures suggest that the better-off farmers of western Maharashtra will benefit almost twice as much as the distressed ones of Vidarbha will from the waiver. The gap between the State’s regions, already the cause of great discontent, is growing. It is painfully clear that neither the Prime Minister’s relief package nor the Chief Minister’s has made any dent on the crisis. Indeed, Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister concluded a Vidarbha tour two months ago expressing anguish over the poor progress of the packages. The waiver too has had little impact. All that remains is the promise of ‘looking into’ the cut-off limit. People are losing the little hope they had. Nothing has happened in the past few years that addresses sharply declining farm incomes in the region. Even the brief rise in cotton prices a few months ago is of a fragile nature. It happened because large swathes of farmland in the United States shifted to biofuels. Meanwhile, a slew of import and export policies and announcements — a call for a ban on cotton exports is one of them — has begun to push down cotton prices again.

The soaring costs of farm inputs and the desperate search for fresh credit for the coming season are not even on the agenda. Indeed, the euphoria over the waiver left little room for a vital question: where do the next season’s loans come from? Inflation and the alarming price rise across the country only make things extremely grim for Vidarbha. The crisis now embraces even the health and education sectors. Hunger is now obvious in even the households that produce food. The scale of the tragedy affecting Vidarbha and such other regions is way beyond the ordinary. It follows that the measures taken to counter it cannot be along conventional lines, more of the same. Vidarbha needs a debt relief tribunal that looks at moneylender debt. It needs confidence, income, price stabilisation, credit, cheaper inputs, and food security. Indeed, rural India as a whole needs radical policy alternatives that recognise and address the deepening agrarian crisis. Relief packages and ad hoc administrative measures are incapable of achieving that.

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