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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Farmers paid peanuts, over 40% looking for better avenues by Omkar Sapre


PUNE: Bandya Pashte, 28, has been cultivating paddy on his family’s five-acre plot in village Veravli in the Konkan, Maharashtra’s coastal strip for about a decade. Last year, though, he threw in the towel because farming is not remunerative and lacks social status. Bandya has since migrated to the city to work as a driver, earning more than he did as a farmer.

While Bandya is unaware of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), he represents the living example of a trend that the NSSO has noted. In its recent report, the NSSO said that given a chance, 40% of farming households would shift to other vocations. Bandya Pashte got a chance and made the shift.

Persistent food inflation, production shortfall in key crops, subsequent high priced imports, falling area under cultivation and the projected 7.51% decline in foodgrain production have been keeping the country on its toes.

The government claimed that drought during the recent kharif season is the main reason for the drop in production and area under cultivation. However, farmers unwilling to continue with farming and instead shift to other professions is a major contributory reason for an agrarian country like India facing foodgrain shortage.

An overwhelming majority of Indian farmers are worse off than the lowest paid government employee, according to the Confederation of the Indian Farmers Associations (Cifa). The average monthly income of farmers ranges between Rs 1,578 and Rs 8,321, while the lowest paid government gets Rs 10,000, assured every month, the Cifa findings reported.

The 2007 report ‘Findings on the plight of farmers’ by the Arjun Sengupta Commission noted ‘agriculture has become a relatively unrewarding profession due to generally unfavourable price regime and low value addition, causing abandoning of farming and increasing migration from rural areas.”

Pashte’s example is no different. “I cultivated around 4,000 kg of rice on my land, but I had a hard time monetising it,” he said, adding, “Middlemen made a lot of money and what I was left with did not even recover my costs. As a driver, I now earn much more, which also allows me pay my children’s school fees. Many farmers in my village have stopped farming and moved to the cities,” Pashte said.

His family now grows some vegetables enough for their daily needs, while foodgrains come from the ration shop. He got himself registered in the below poverty line (BPL) category and now finds its easier to get subsidised foodgrain under the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), than to grow it for the country. A large number of farmers from many villages in Konkan have abandoned farming and turned to other professions. Interestingly, most of them have taken on the BPL tag because of the subsidised foodgrain that is ensured to them. The AAY scheme has been running since 2000.

“One can ‘manage’ to become and get a BPL card and villagers now take pride in saying they are BPL,” said a public distribution official, requesting anonymity. The AAY scheme has no time line, does not emphasise the need for beneficiaries to make some effort to rise above the poverty line and move out of the scheme. So once registered, subsidised foodgrain is a given thing for lifetime, a better deal than farming. Did we say farmers are an endangered community?