STARVATION and suicide plagues India’s farmers and rural poor more severely today than it did prior to the country’s green revolution.
According to Palagummi Sainath, Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu and world expert on famine, the country is flailing under the weight of an entrenched acceptance of social and economic inequality, which has taken a staggering toll on India’s rural population and farming communities.
Speaking at the Australia India Institute’s Baba Amte Memorial Lecture this week on Rural distress in the Age of Inequality Mr Sainath said that a crisis of rural poverty has been largely overlooked by Indian media and policy makers, and indeed, the world.
Home to the fourth largest percentage of billionaires in the world, India has recorded a quarter of a million farmer suicides between 1995 and 2010, and every year an exodus of thousands of farmers and farm workers leave agriculture. In the last eight years, one farmer is believed to have taken their life every 30 minutes.
According to Mr Sainath, the shame is not only that very little notice has been paid to such human tragedy in the agricultural sector, but that these depressing statistics are not due to natural disaster or war, but to human-created economic policies – and they are not unique to India.
“They involve the withdrawal of the state from sectors which matter to the poor. Governments are nakedly activist in the sectors which belong to the super-rich and are interventionist on behalf of big business and big capital,” Mr Sainath said.
Obscene spending and inequality in India grew faster than ever in the last 20 years, according to Mr Sainath, and not only that, but the divide between rich and poor has become something which is nurtured by the country’s institutions.
The rise of global food prices has left a particularly indelible mark on India’s rural communities, in many cases forcing the elderly to return to work in their 70s and 80s. This is a country where the price of lentils has risen to 90-100 rupees/kg and a monthly pension for the elderly sits at 200 rupees per month.
Meanwhile, India’s Planning Commission has not budged on the figure of 26 rupees (about 50 cents) a day as an acceptable poverty-line.
But just as the rural crisis has been created by people, Mr Sainath believes India and its people have the means to solve it. The shocking scale of farmer suicides, is not the cause of the farm crisis, it is its outcome.
“The drive towards corporate agriculture is a key cause,” he said.
“There has been an explosion in input costs – be it seed, fertiliser, machinery or water… where once it cost $200 to cultivate and irrigate one acre of cotton, now it costs $1,000.”
And assistance in meeting these costs has not been forthcoming. Mid-way through the last decade, investment in Indian agriculture turned negative.
Mr Sainath points to an unravelling of neo politics and neo economics as the ultimate fix for the malaise of global subsidies crippling farmers and the fraught system of agricultural credit loans.
In a world which “wastes one and a half trillion dollars in a week for bankers who stuffed up,” Mr Sainath said, we’re long overdue for a step away from greed and a return to empathy.
India, in his view, has the power to change the situation of its citizens, but it will require a return to some of the most important and most overlooked foundations of its government.
The Directive Principles of State Policy are guidelines to the central and state governments of India to be kept in mind while framing laws and policies. While they are not enforceable by law (and thus currently thoroughly ignored) they are designed to create social and economic conditions under which citizens can lead a good life.
And this is what Mr Sainath said he would like to see re-awakened.
“Growing insensitivity is the baggage of growing inequality,” he said.
“What does it require for a person to keep on living decadently while another farm goes belly-up? With all its capabilities, India can do better than this.”
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