Agricultures Reforms will not address the core issues of Indian Agrarian Crisis- Kishore Tiwari
Dated-20 December 2020
Even disputed agriculture reforms are in line with reforms introduced by earlier UPA,Kishor Tiwari, farm activist and chairman of the Vasantrao Naik Sheti Swavalamban Mission of Maharashtra ,In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said today that these so called historic reforms will not addressed the core issues of input cost reduction and bring profitability to output cost of agriculture produce ,shifting the crop patter as per demand supply situation globally, restoration of credit with sustainable risk management with farmers friendly banking facility .
Kishor Tiwari, farm activist was reacting the humble appeal farmers whose overwhelming response to the farmers stir has once again brought to the fore the agrarian crisis currently on in the country.
In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Tiwari said these are reforms were tried in Maharashtra since 2006 as part of PM Package then 2010 and 2015 but failed to increase the income of farmers or failed to bring any type of investment in post processing or creating market linkages at rural level hence addressing the core issues of cost ,credit and crop is topmost priority .
Tiwari said that the current agrarian crisis in India is a product of two factors: failure to recognise the diminishing returns and state failure to come up with alternatives; and the economic impact of withdrawal of subsidies resulting deep rooted farm crisis as diminishing soil fertility, sinking water table, increasing costs and poor returns to farmers, periodic unaffordable spikes in to inputs and periodic excess production which are dumped stocks , ruining several farmers and a huge burden on the government due to faulty import polices .
he urged the government to have a relook at its agrarian programmes in order to mitigate the distress of farmers. Drawing attention to what he called disturbing facts, Tiwari stated that despite schemes like loan waiver, farm credit, irrigation and electricity supply to pump sets, an “unaccountable and hostile” bureaucracy was failing to provide relief to farmers.
He said that stringent norms introduced by the bureaucracy was keeping eligible farmers out of the relief network. Faulty policies of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) and other financial institutions had also failed to keep to the deadline laid down by the government for these schemes, he said.
“Poor” intervention
Tiwari said in the letter that these factors were creating an atmosphere of no-confidence among farmers. He stated that all major crops, like cotton, soyabean, pulses and paddy were being sold at prices lower than the stipulated Minimum Support Price due to stringent norms laid down by the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED)and the Cotton Corporation of India. He said the government’s intervention in this matter was “poor”.
No benefit to small farmers
Tiwari asked the government to give attention to the holistic national policy attending the unfinished agenda of land reforms, equal water distribution , technology fatigue, institutional credit and marketing as major causes for the agrarian crisis.
Tiwari said, in the letter, that Maharashtra had started working aggressively on core issues raised in the report related to land, water, bio-resources, credit and insurance, technology, knowledge management and markets.
He pointed out that the ground reality was that these programmes had not reached the small and needy farmers. “Farming is largely an unorganised sector. No systematic institutional and organisational planning is involved in cultivation, irrigation, harvesting etc. Institutional finance is not adequately available and minimum purchase price (MSP) fixed by the government does not reach the poorest farmer,” he said hence relooking into the reforms is only solution to end deadlock .
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