CROCODILE TEARS FOR THE FARMERS

The policy makers in India have been ignoring the farming sector for quite some time ever since the neo-globalisation has been unleashed. Traditionally, India and Indians prefer industry to agriculture and white collar or blue collar jobs to farming though 68% of the Indian work force is engaged in agriculture. We are now willing to surrender acres of farm land to convert them into concrete jungles for SEZs.

What is more astounding is that despite India’s spectacular economic growth since the liberalisation silent 300 million Indians are surviving on less than a dollar a day. That means one in every five Indians suffers from covert or overt in India. The food sufficiency at the aggregate level has not been translated into food security at the household level as per the UNDP’s HDR 2006. If the government is serious about development it has to set specific targets and dead lines to reduce poverty, hunger, illiteracy, maternal and infant mortality etc as has been envisaged by the UN. The development must be inclusive and aim at the continuous empowerment of the people. In India, a lot of wealth is accumulated in a few hands if the reports are to be believed. While the government has a constitutional and moral obligation to look after the needs of the poor the filthy rich has no such social responsibility. Hence accumulation of wealth in the hands of a 36 Indian billionaires out of the 1100 million Indians will not be a good idea.

In spite of this, few are seriously concerned about the shrinking resource of land for agriculture. Few are apprehensive whether the Indian agriculture produce can feed all Indians or not. Few are earnest about the welfare of 68% of the Indian work force engaged in agriculture and who toil under trying circumstances. Even for the chief Ministers suicides of the hapless farmers are windfalls to seek more central aid for the affected farmers and then divert the funds to other heads. In case of food shortage of crops fail the authorities concerned are awfully cheerful as importing millions of tons of food grains from abroad is a profitable venture for the politician-businessmen duo.

However, the present dismal scenario of Indian agriculture is ominously waiting for raising its ugly head in the future in the form of acute to severe shortage of foods. Nevertheless, the politicians are kneeling down when only asked to bend before the manufacturing sector, squarely surrendering thousands of acres of land to the industrial heavy weights. They are snatching away the precious shrinking resource viz land from the tillers and gifting it away to the big industrial houses. Even the communists who once raised the political slogan of land for tillers have no qualms to kill scores of farmers to grab their land for the rich and the powerful for non-agricultural purposes. Both the print media and the electronic media went overboard to support such patent anti-farmer policies and have no compunctions to shed crocodile tears for the farmers.