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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Elections 2019: India Shining 2.0 surfaces in Rural India -Sayantan Bera

Elections 2019: India Shining 2.0 surfaces in Rural India -Sayantan Bera

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published Published on Dec 22, 2018   modified Modified on Dec 22, 2018
-Livemint.com

With barely a few months to go for 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the question across political party lines is: what can really be done now, and quickly?

New Delhi:
When residents gather around the fire on foggy winter evenings in Rampura, a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly district, the conversation often veers toward the declining fortunes in agriculture. Take 27-year-old Pushpendra Singh, who completed his master’s degree in commerce in 2016, but was unable to find a decent job. Singh now toils on the family farm so that his younger brother can finish his studies and find a teaching job. His family has a debt of Rs. 6 lakh , but that has not stopped them from spending about Rs. 12,000 each month to educate the younger son.

“People feel their incomes plummeted after Prime Minister Narendra Modi took charge…now the only option is to vote the BJP out in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections,” says Singh. When asked why he’s yet to marry, Singh promptly replies: “These days, even farmers do not want to marry their daughter in a family dependent on agriculture…they don’t mind lowly government jobs or any job where incomes are regular and stable. My family may own 10 acres of land but I will not be able to spend even Rs. 500 to take my wife to the town for a movie.”

Roughly 1,400km from Rampura, 19-year-old Sharad Markad, a young farmer from Ahmednagar in Maharashtra, shares a similar predicament. Faced with a drought, the third time in the last five years, Markad took upon himself to set up a cattle shed in his village where he is looking after 85 cows and buffaloes. Families in his village are struggling to keep their pomegranate orchards alive by hiring water tankers on credit.

“It’s scary…the fields are empty. Nobody has planted winter crops. Yet, we are selling pomegranates at a loss, for as low as ?10 per kg,” he says. In neighbouring Nashik, farmers are selling the Kharif (Autumn) harvest of onions at a pitiful Rs. 1-2 a kg, while the bulb is retailing in cities for Rs. 30.

Dismayed protesters

Markad and Singh have never met each other, but they were both in Delhi last month—joining thousands in a protest march to Parliament Street led by farmers—in order to make their case for a farm loan waiver and to remind Prime Minister Narendra Modi of his promise of better returns for farmers. Both returned dismayed.

But with the contest for who gets to be India’s next prime minister heating up, it has become that much harder to ignore angry young men like Markad and Singh. On Tuesday, in an impromptu media briefing outside Parliament, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said: “We will not let the Prime Minister sleep until he waives off farm loans.” Responding to a question, Gandhi also said that the Congress would announce a nationwide farm loan waiver if it comes to power in 2019.

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Livemint.com, 19 December, 2018, https://www.livemint.com/Politics/Hb1jpRp4R3fkY15yDlfj0O/2019-lok-sabha-elections-rahul-gandhi-farm-loan-waiver-modi.html?fbclid=IwAR26YTIXlQERNNWj_xPb75KWjAYknAg2M6dW


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