Farm sector across the nation has been craving for better attention from the central and state governments. Piecemeal efforts at giving farmers support price for their produce; the implementation of such schemes in a haphazard manner, and lack of effective mechanisms to establish direct links between the production centres and markets remain huge problems. Large numbers of farmers commit suicide due to distress situations like crop failure and lack of proper insurance mechanisms. Large numbers thus fall in a debt trap. Hence the assurance by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a group of farmers that his government would fix Minimum Support Price (MSP) for farm produces at 150 per cent of the input costs for Kharif crops is a small way of saving the farm sector from the deep crisis it is in today.
The Modi government has just entered its pre-election phase, after completing four years of the NDA rule since 2014. The government has,no doubt, taken several steps to rev up the farm sector, but the
scenario is such that the more efforts governments put in the more the burgeoning problems of farmers. The official figures relating to farmer suicides, the latest one being of 2015, showed that
over 8,000 farmers committed suicide, against the 2014 figure of 5,600. Failure to repay debts taken for farming operations led to nearly 40 per cent of these deaths, officials reckoned.
The recent protests by farmers from western Maharashtra in Mumbai, led by a red outfit, was noted for the extent of discontent prevailing in the farm sector.
The perception is that the Modi government didn’t do enough to save the farm sector from a crisis situation. This is evident also in the delay in announcement of remunerative prices for sugar cane, that
should have been done at the start of June when monsoon arrives in India. While there are arrears of over Rs 20,000 crore from sugar mills to farmers who supplied the cane, the PM’s admitted this week that one-fifth of this has been paid in the past one week itself as part of a governmental push.
Such small steps cannot extricate farmers from falling into debt traps. There should have been
well-organised mechanisms to ensure fair price to farmers for their produce. Farm sector needs a visionary approach and should not be aimed at election success only since 70 per cent of
Indians live on income from this sector.