In light of readings provided, reflect on any aspect of the current

agrarian crisis in India.

In India, around 66% of the population lives in rural areas. Majority of the
population is involved in agriculture and agriculture sector also contributes
around 18% to the GDP. The last quarter’s GDP contracted by 22.8%,
agriculture sector’s grew by 3.4%, but that is how the agriculture sector is
commonly seen now. In a country with so much diversity, in every aspect,
where there is heterogeneity in how the farming is done and how the villages
operate, the agrarian crisis and its intensity also depends upon the region,
community, and many other aspects. There’s rain, flood, drought and other
natural disasters that also affect the agricultural sector and hence the lives of
the farmers. Price of crops, marketing of the produce, facilities, debt are some
of the many problems that farmers’ in India are facing. The migration of
labourers from their villages to cities in search of jobs is a common
phenomenon.

Dipankar Gupta in his writing “Whither the Indian Village: Culture and
Agriculture in ‘Rural’ India” explains how villages are not the same as they are
being described commonly even in the academia, and while there has been
change in villages, the agricultural sector has also changed, from land
distribution to relationship among the farmers. The landholding structure in
villages is such that there aren’t many jobs that can engage and sustain rural
population, and the availability of urban jobs makes a difference. This forms
the country-town nexus. This can also be understood from the recent
example of how migrant labourers had to walk back to their respective
villages during the Covid-19 lockdown. Gupta argues ‘The village is shrinking
as a sociological reality, though it still exists as space. Nowhere else does
one find the level of hopeless disenchantment as one does in the rural
regions of India’, what was seen as village has changed, and the realities of
villages has been exposed in many ways, be it the harassment of lower-caste
population by the upper caste, poor by the rich, tenant by the landlord, mostly
the same people in majority of the cases or be it the idea of agriculture being
sustainable enough for families to fulfil their needs and aspirations. At one
point, farming was something farmers were proud of and would not choose
anything else other than farming, its not the case anymore. Caste dynamics
in villages have also changed, and lower caste population who were working
on someone else’s land are refusing to work in the fields owned by upper
caste population and are moving towards there occupation. This explains the
shift. Be it the Adi dharmis of Punjab, Jatavs of the Uttar Pradesh or the
Mahars of Maharashtra, they have moved from being agricultural labourers to
doing and looking for other opportunities in cities or in their own village, like
opening shops or working as construction labourers and other jobs. As the
rural structure has seen a change, so has the politics around the agrarian
issues, when there were more labourers engaged directly in the fields, there
used to be labourer’s movement, but now that has changed too and they do
not necessarily make the majority, and hence aren’t considered to be centre
of the politics, which is now majorly based on the caste vote-bank. Even
though the promises of doubling the farmers’ income and providing better
market are constant promises made by the political parties and governments,
the policies do not echo the same intention, and are instead moved towards
reservation for owner-cultivator section of the agricultural sector. Recently,
there has been no discussion and debates in politics related to agrarian crisis,
even after floods in multiple states, and the farm bills that have been passed
even after strong protest against them by the farmers around the country. The
farmers also argue that the agricultural tax exemption is to support the bigger
farmers because most of the other farmers, own less than 5 acres of land and
would anyway fall under the no tax slab of taxation policies, and hence it
makes no sense to exempt tax. Rural Non-Farm employment is also
increasing in villages, which means that people are moving away from
agriculture to earn. The rich and the poor, the landholders and the landless,
all of them see their future outside the village.

Green revolution brought High Yield Variety Seeds to India in 1960s and also
the technological advancement, better equipments for farming, and it also
created gap, farmers who could afford HYVs and equipments were able to
move away from the traditional farming and farmers who couldn’t afford were
left with their traditional techniques. It also gave hope to many and many
farmers also went for loan, to buy equipments, and the produce couldn’t pay
them enough. This is one of the many reasons farmers borrow money, and
debt has been a major reason behind farmers’ suicide, but there are many
other reasons as well. B.B. Mohanty explains the farmer’s suicide through
Durkheim’s Types. A data by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows
that as many as 42480 farmers and daily wage workers committed suicide in
2019, which was 6% more than 2018. While there has been research papers
that show that debt and other financial reasons are the reasons behind the
farmers’ suicide, there have been rarely any papers to figure out the other
reasons that can be behind the farmers’ suicide, Mohanty’s paper tries to do
so. Earlier before the British Raj in India, agriculture was mostly based on the
local needs and agriculture was integrated with the social structure. When
British Raj came into power, they introduced several new policies through
which they commercialised agriculture and hence the riches of the time
acquired more land to produce cash crops like cotton, sugarcane and jute.
Under British Raj, even this was done with accordance to caste system, the
upper castes acquired land and moneylending business while the lower
castes were labourers. The farmers were dependent on moneylenders for
their investment, who would charge more interest from farmers, the entry of
the private players in the seed business and the pressure to produce more,
required more investment, and post economic liberalisation, with the entry of
international market, farmers faced price risk, all of these policies worked
against farmers and hence instead of making farmers prosperous, it made
them financially weaker.

A new social order was established in villages, the concept of joint family,
which would provide members the support and stability at the time of crisis
were now becoming nuclear family, a lot of families turned into smaller
families to save their land from ceiling laws. Not just this but with the
introduction of new farming techniques, the famers with traditional skills and
knowledge of traditional techniques became irrelevant and were isolated from
the larger community. The need of discussion among farmers about farming
is no more and hence there is more isolation and competition to produce
more among farmers themselves. Mohanty has given some empirical
evidence of egoism and anomie cases of suicide. Egoistic suicide occurs
when there is absence of adequate social integration, when the person feels
social isolation, the person feels that life lacks purpose and meaning. Anomic
suicide occurs when the social regulation is too weak or disrupted. In this
case the individual’s horizon is broadened beyond what he can induce.
Mohanty gave evidences from Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and
Punja and some of the common setups were nuclear family, loneliness, some
sort of social disintegration like divorce and separation, responsibilities of the
family and most of them were young. In other cases, some farmers took more
loan in order to buy land in the hope of producing more and earning more, but
ended up not achieving it. Disappointments of not being able to achieve what
the farmers hoped for and the isolation from community and neighbourhood
were two main reasons behind suicide.

The situation isn’t much different today, in 2019, around 50000 farmers from
different parts of Maharashtra marched to Mumbai to protest against the
government and the main issues were farm loan waiver, minimum supports
price and other facilities like irrigation facilities etc. The same crisis still exists
and farmers have no other choice but to move away from agriculture. People
now prefer any other job, away from their village, which pays them a fixed
amount rather than taking load and farming, having no assurance of return.
Recently the political discussion has moved towards agrarian crisis in some
sense, for example- In Chhattisgarh, right before the Legislative Assembly
Elections of 2018, Congress announced that they will give 2500/quintal for
paddy instead of 2000-2100/quintal that the BJP government was giving, they
also promised loan waiver for farmers. These promises in their manifestos
made them win the election. Some other states have also had these
discussions and debates around agrarian issues. The politics and policies
needs change in order to deal with these crisis and support the agricultural
sector and stop farmers from committing suicide.The market for crops and the
dynamic of the rural sector are other factors that will keep determining the
social order and how the agrarian crisis are defined and dealt by the farmers
on their own in some ways, or will this create more problems for them.