Maharashtra farmers’ march: No piecemeal solutions to the farm crisis

Two of the many fallacies of the current agrarian crisis facing the country’s most industrialised state are that the farmers’ issues are restricted to loan waivers, and that the state-wide resentment in Maharashtra is monolithic in nature. The current march is also to demand fair allocation of forest land, a minimum support price (MSP) that is one and a half times that of the production cost, and waiving of pending energy bills.

This is a problem not restricted to Maharashtra alone, though. The state’s farmers have concerns similar to those of the rest of the country; the magnitude and the specifics may differ. For instance, data released by the Census of India – and published by this paper in February this year – proves that Dalit farmers across the country are not likely to benefit from farm reforms announced by the government as the policies are aimed at owners of farm lands, rather than the labour force that works in them. More than 70% of agricultural labourers are in debt. Consequently, the suicide rate among them is higher as they do not have access to the formal loan economy, which land owners do.

Maharashtra, like the rest of India, has other problems, too, including the over-dependence on the monsoon for growing crops, the lack of empowered village-level redress mechanisms, a massive pest outbreak that has all but destroyed the cotton crop for this year and has left millions without income, and the inconsistencies in the disbursal of farm loan waivers. The debate over MSP is unlikely to end soon, with there being several schools of thought on what the best formula should be. It is for all these reasons that no state government in India can ignore the agrarian crisis and aim to pacify protesting farmers and win easy votes through loan waivers. Besides, huge loan waivers have a significant impact on a state’s economy as it adversely affects other infrastructure investments. This is exactly what happened to Maharashtra this year, when the state government presented a budget that has no new turnkey project despite the promises made over the last year. There is an urgent need for Maharashtra to address the looming emergency in the farm sector, and it is a crisis that won’t go away with piecemeal solutions.