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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India’s farm crisis is of the middle peasant, not the chhota kisan -Harish Damodaran

India’s farm crisis is of the middle peasant, not the chhota kisan -Harish Damodaran

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published Published on Feb 11, 2021   modified Modified on Feb 12, 2021

-The Indian Express

It is the rural middle class — which experienced a roughly four-decade spell of prosperity from the 1970s and now has its back to the wall — that’s at the forefront of the agitation against the farm reform laws.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has defended his government’s agricultural reform laws by invoking Chaudhary Charan Singh and pointing to the “dayaniya sthiti (sorry plight)” of marginal farmers. These below-one-hectare cultivators accounted for 51 per cent of India’s total operational holdings in 1970-71, a share that crossed 68 per cent in the last 2015-16 Agriculture Census.

PM Modi further quoted the legendary peasant leader as saying that marginal farmers could never eke out an honest existence, no matter how much they worked their small piece of land. The suggestion here was that the crisis of Indian agriculture is of the chhota kisan and the government’s reform measures are aimed at uplifting this stratum of smallholders.

The above understanding of “crisis” isn’t the most helpful, whether from an analytical or even political perspective. To begin with, as the political scientist Paul R Brass has shown, Charan Singh didn’t believe agriculture policy should focus on the one-hectare farmer. The redemption for those tilling tiny uneconomic plots lay in non-farm employment, especially in rural small-scale and cottage industries. Charan Singh, in fact, advocated both a maximum ceiling of 27.5 acres and a minimum floor of 2.5 acres that would provide decent subsistence and also prevent large-scale capitalist farming. His ideal was the efficient yeoman farmer who actively cultivated his own land with minimal engagement of outside labour.

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The Indian Express, 11 February, 2021, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/farm-crisis-indian-farmers-agricultural-reform-7183273/?fbclid=IwAR3MAGZfNRBFw44KYwB7h8cNoP7TYPVmfGCjoBCHTwwlWkmmt726T8PFU1E


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