Saving the Indian farmer

IIPM PUBLICATION

The Prime Minister needs to move beyond posturing

Beginning with Andhra Pradesh, the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, is launching a tour of various states to assess the unprecedented crisis that confronts Indian agriculture. According to his spin doctors, the Prime Minister is now convinced that something urgent and drastic needs to be done with Indian agriculture before things get out of hand. After all, you cannot really claim to represent the ‘masses’ if farmers commit suicide in their thousands. So while criss-crossing the country, the Prime Minister will be consulting and seeking the cooperation of chief ministers to find durable solutions to this crisis. As the spin doctors elaborate, stagnant and declining productivity levels are a key area of concern, apart from issues like lack of institutional credit, declining quality of soil and the lack of infrastructure that prevent Indian farmers from reaping the fruits of globalisation.

But does Manmohan Singh really need to travel across the length and breadth of the country to find out what ails Indian agriculture. Sitting in his fortified Race Course Road residence, or the even more heavily fortified office at South Block, Dr. Singh, being the good economist that he is, cannot only dissect the crisis; he would also know exactly what steps can be taken to rescue Indian agriculture sector and the farmers from its current state of misery. For that matter, even a college student of Economics, who is even remotely familiar with Indian agriculture, knows what the solutions are. And economists and analysts have been talking their throats hoarse about this issue.

Being the good economist that he is, Dr. Singh would know that Indian farmers, like producers and suppliers anywhere in the world, will benefit immensely if they have better access to markets. Far from ensuring that the Indian farmer can sell across the globe, the government persists with the insanely repressive law that makes a farmer selling his output outside his state, a criminal. Being the decent democrat that Dr. Singh is, he also could not have failed to note the sheer arrogance and anti-farmer stance of his own government when private companies like Reliance and ITC were warned against buying food grains directly from farmers. That’s because the private players were offering much more to the farmer, creating a situation in which the Food Corporation of India was not able to buy stocks.

Why does Dr. Singh need to do a cross country marathon in this searing heat when he knows all this and much more? He could do better by advising his Agriculture Minister, Sharad Pawar, to pay more attention to the farmer and less to the state of Indian cricket. Then again, is he in a position to do even that?

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2007

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative