Miserable Plight Of The Debt-Ridden Punjabi Farmer
Washington, D.C., Wednesday, August 19, 1998 - The Punjab governments financed study on rural credit, in the year 1997, reported that Sikh farmers in the Indian occupied Sikh majority state were under a debt of Rs. 5,700 crores (fifty seven billion rupees) and pay an annual interest of Rs. 1,102 crores (or eleven billion one hundred and two rupees). Despite this factual study the Badal government has failed to ease the burden of the rural Sikh.The Indian occupied Punjab state government has passed no law and issued no directive to protect the farmer. It has given no warning to the money-lenders and finance companies that the government would intervene in favour of the farmers if they are unable to repay the loans given for non-productive purposes by the "Bania and the Babu" mafia. In fact the so-called farmer friendly Badal government has done zilch for the Sikh farmer groaning under the burden of debt which keeps mounting every year.
The tragedy is that in the past 20 years the cost of inputs in farming has risen over five times while the yield per acre has come down. Despite a number of suicides (in the hundred) by farmers in the Punjab, and other Indian states, the issue has not been allowed, by the vested interests, to snowball into a major politico-economic issue which could have resulted in the reform of an ailing and neglected agriculture sector.
A recent article, however, in the Tribune Chandigarh; "Why farms are becoming killing fields", by one Devindra Sharma, focuses on the issue and laments that; "In any functional democracy in the West, a suicide "epidemic" of such a magnitude would have created unprecedented political and administrative upheavals. If not the dismissal of state governments, the death toll would have definitely resulted in the immediate sacking of several top functionaries including the union and state agriculture secretaries. After all farmers were forced to commit suicide because of serious lapses in technology, abuse of pesticides and faulty policy initiatives - all under the administrative control o agriculture secretaries."
Sharma goes on to state that; "for the past several years, the entire effort of the government has been to mop up as much foodgrains as possible. Gasping in political uncertainty, the ruling BJP, as well as the state governments have preferred to play down the suicide epidemic. In the bargain, the real causes behind what appears to be greatest tragedy since the days of the green revolution still remain buried under official apathy."
The article questions that; "If after 50 years of independence, millions of small and marginal farmers do not have a safety net, and are unable to emerge free from their subsistence living conditions, then there is something terribly wrong with the way agriculture is being managed?" . Mr. Sharma accepts the fact that most agricultural credit through cooperatives is subsidized but he illustrates the grim situation by stating that; "If you think that these loans are used to build agriculture, you are certainly mistaken as our farmers cultivate something like 175 million hectares. In 1990-1991, cooperatives commercial banks together loaned Rs. 13,555 crore to farmers. This sounds a lot of money till you divide it by 175 million hectares. It works out to be Rs. 775 per hectare, which, as any farmer will tell you, is not even enough to buy wheat seed for planting a hectare. A good portion of that Rs. 13, 555 crore were actually in the form of "adjustment". A farmer who already owes Rs. 600 goes to his cooperative and gets a new loan of Rs. 700. Out of the Rs. 700, he pays back the principle and interest on his old loan, buys tea for the secretary, and walks out the door with Rs. 15 or so."
The above grim description comes pretty close to the situation being faced by the debt-ridden farmer in Indian occupied Punjab as he has to dish out Rs. 1,102 crore as interest every year to the money-lender and the cooperatives, both dominated by the urban BJP cadre. No wonder a number of farmers committed suicide in the Sangrur district of the Punjab who could not get out of the debt trap laid by the moneylenders. Instead of using disinformation that these suicides were a result of domestic feuds, as the Punjab government has done, the Punjab Chief Minister ought to intervene effectively to prevent the Sikh farmers from getting caught in a vicious dept trap without taking away from them the right to borrow.
It is simple, the Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal all has to do is to steel his spine and show some political will. He could use his majority in state legislature to pass a law that the government will intervene in favor of the beleaguered farmers if they are unable to pay the interest, or the principle, on loans taken from moneylenders and cooperatives. He could also legislate a three years holiday on interest's payments to give time to the Punjabi farmer to recover from his debt-ridden squalor.
Having let down the quarter million Sikh farmers of Udham Singh Nagar district, with his double talk and lack of will, it is hoped that Chief minister of Indian occupied Punjab, Mr. Parkash Singh Badal will, for a change, show some moral courage on this issue and help the Sikh farmers drowning under the burden of an intolerable debt. For this debt the rural Sikh has to shell out every year (1991 figure) the kingly sum of Rs 1,100 crore just as interest. How about it Mr. Badal?