More Promises: PM Attempts to Assure Farmers in the Face of Agrarian Crisis

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is back yet again with his promises to the farming sector, but this time through his controversial NaMo app. Today, on June 20, Modi addressed groups of farmers who were asked to be present at selected Krishi Vignan Kendras in nearly 600 districts across the country. At a time when agriculture distress is shaking the country, and lakhs of farmers are agitating across the states, Modi claimed that the situation has been improving despite the evident broken promises BJP made to farmers during 2014 election campaign.

Among the latest promises, Modi claimed that the farmers’ income will be doubled by 2022. For this to happen, the PM said that the government is working on four fronts – to lower the input cost for agriculture, ensuring appropriate pricing for agrarian produce, taking up measures to reduce wastage and provide alternate means of income to farmers. But, a closer look at the state of agriculture in the last four years under the BJP rule would reveal the compromising attitude of this regime towards the agrarian sector.

Agriculture Growth

Economists have estimated that agriculture would require annual growth rate of nearly 15 per cent to double farmers’ incomes by 2022. Disputing this, NITI Aayog economists claimed that an annual growth rate of 10.4 per cent would be enough in reaching this task. Even if the latter claim is taken to be true, consider the trend in agriculture growth rate of the present regime. From 5.6 per cent in 2013-14, the agriculture growth rate fell to a low of 0.2 per cent in 2014-15, the year BJP came to power.  It rose to 0.7% in 2015-16, 4.9% in 2016-17 and is predicted at 2.1% in 2017-18. In spite of such volatile growth, the government has contributed in further multiplying the agrarian crisis while the farmers’ income is drastically reduced. On the other side, the wages of agriculture workers, who constitute to nearly 55 per cent of those involved in agriculture, are completely neglected. Recent studies have shown that the rural wages have been stagnating for the last four years.

Despite such faltering growth rate, budget allocated for agriculture is only 2.36 per cent of the total union budget 2018-19, which is to the tune of about 2.1 lakh crore.

Modi claimed that the minimum support price (MSP) for all crops has been fixed at least 1.5 times the cost of production from this crop season. However, the formula for calculating this attracted much criticism from experts. For calculating MSP plus 50 per cent, the BJP introduced A2+FL+50% formula instead of the promised C2+50%. This turns to be a massive hoax as the A2+FL formula takes into account only the actual cost plus imputed value of family labour in the production of a crop. But the C2 formula factors in actual costs incurred, including imputed rent on land and interest on capital. Experts often argue that the small and marginal farmers, who account for more than 86 per cent of all farmers, do not benefit from MSP as they do not have marketable surplus. 

Suicides

Predictably, Modi did not speak about the central crisis in the agrarian sector – farmers suicides. As the data shows, nearly 36,000 farmers’ suicides were reported in just first three years after BJP came to power. 
As the government’s policies under Modi have neglected small, marginal farmers and agricultural workers, will the latest promises appease the disillusioned farming community?