The ongoing agrarian crisis and consequent suicides of farmers are downplayed and grossly under-reported, said Vijoo Krishnan, joint secretary, All India Kisan Sabha, here on Monday.
Speaking at the release of the book ‘Whither rural India? Political economy of agrarian transformation in contemporary India’, which is a Festschrift for renowned economist Venkatesh B. Athreya, at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), he said around 800 farmers committed suicide in the past four months in Maharashtra alone. “In a place called Anantpur, there have been eight suicides in the past one month,” he said.
“Even during the farmers’ long march from Nashik to Mumbai earlier this year, while the issues of low price for farm produce and loan waivers were highlighted by the media, food scarcity among poorer agrarian families was not highlighted.”
All the speakers at the book release heaped praise on Mr. Athreya for his contributions.
N. Ram, chairman, THG Publishing Private Limited, said Mr. Athreya was not only a scholar, a professor of economics, a leading contributor to the field of political economy and storehouse of knowledge on Marx’s ‘Capital’, but also combined scholarship with commitment towards justice in the India context in a radical sense.
Accessible writing
He recollected Mr. Athreya’s contributions in improving the literacy rate, mainly through ‘Arivoli Iyakkam’, and in addressing gender-related issues.
Highlighting Mr. Athreya’s ability to write in a manner that is accessible to the common man, Mr. Ram said, “More space must be provided in this age of information chaos for clear sighted contributions of the kind that Venkatesh is capable of making.”
He also stressed the need for making selected writings of Mr. Athreya available online.
M.S. Swaminathan, eminent agricultural scientist, expressed the hope that the findings of the book would lead to changes in agricultural policies, particularly in making the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme more skill-based.
Praising Mr. Athreya for his simplicity, Sheela Rani Chunkath, a retired IAS officer, said he was a person who had truly transcended all the dimensions of caste, class and gender-based disparities.
The book was a collection of 12 papers presented in a seminar on ‘Agriculture and Rural India after Economic Reforms’, organised in 2016, by those who did their doctoral research under the guidance of Mr. Athreya.