There is a new “murder mystery” animating the insular political circles of Delhi: Who killed Gajendra Singh? A farmer from Dausa in Rajasthan, he hung himself on April 22, from a tree at Jantar Mantar where the Aam Aadmi Party was holding a rally to protest agricultural distress and the land acquisition ordinance. Almost before his dead body was brought down from the tree, allegations and counter-allegations flew fast and thick. Although later, Arvind Kejriwal, in an extraordinary act of political courage, accepted some of the blame, initially the AAP said that the Delhi Police did not take timely action. It just stood around and watched while a man was threatening to kill himself.
The Delhi Police is not under the elected government of Delhi, so the onus for the tragedy fell on the Bharatiya Janata Party, in power at the Centre, to which the Delhi Police reports. The BJP came up with a more bizarre accusation. It said that the death of Gajendra was a “conspiracy” by the AAP to malign the Central government. The Delhi state government has instituted a magisterial inquiry into the incident. The Delhi Police says this is illegal and will not be able to cooperate with it. In this major political Mahabharata, Gajendra, and the reason why he died, has become a forgotten footnote.
Gajendra’s death attracted nationwide attention because it happened in the capital in a sensational manner. However, farmers’ suicides have for quite some time become the norm. Since 1995, almost 300,000 farmers have committed suicides. The figures have remained consistently alarming since then. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 15,963 farmers committed suicide in 2010; 14,207 in 2011; 13,754 in 2012 and 11,772 in 2013. Today, 46 farmers commit suicide every day, which means that one farmer kills himself every 30 minutes. Maharashtra, an otherwise developed state, has the worst record. Almost one-fourth of all farmer suicides happen here, and this has consistently been the case for the last 15 years. This year, 257 farmers have committed suicide in the period from January to March.
The real culprit for this tragic state of affairs is the institutional neglect of agriculture for decades. Agriculture accounts for over 60 per cent of our workforce, including the maximum number of the absolutely poor. However, it contributes less than 15 per cent to the gross domestic product. In fact, the very structure of our economy is skewed. The service sector, which employs the least number of people, accounts for 56 per cent of our GDP; industry, which should be providing gainful employment to a very large segment of the population, has only a 28 per cent share; and, agriculture, on which the bulk of the population subsists, is at the bottom of the heap.
While the economy as a whole has shown sustained periods of high growth, especially after the reforms of 1991, agriculture has languished for decades, at a national growth average of two to three per cent. We have the world’s largest endowment of fertile agricultural land, but our food productivity is very low. China’s rice yield per hectare is twice that of ours; that of Vietnam and Indonesia is 50 per cent more. Even a successful farming state like Punjab has an average rice harvest of only 3.8 tonnes per hectare; the world average is 4.3 tonnes. The crying need for decades now is for a quantum increase in agricultural productivity through massive investments and reforms. These include more remunerative prices for farmers, improved procurement methods, better seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, much wider irrigation reach, credible credit avenues, cold chains, storage facilities, satellite mapping and research and development inputs. (For instance, Brazil spends 1.7 per cent of its GDP on agricultural research. What we spend does not even register.)
The blunt charge against the present government is that it has further marginalised the agriculture and irrigation sectors. Unfortunately, this appears to be part of a conscious philosophy. Simply stated, this seeks to concentrate on mechanical GDP growth by pampering the already privileged, at the cost of the middle class, the poor, the deprived and the marginalised. The rationale is that if the size of the economic cake grows, largely due to facilitating the corporate sector, some crumbs will fall by the wayside for the needy as well. How else can one explain the allocations made in the two Budgets presented by this government? In his first Budget, finance minister Arun Jaitley allocated Rs 37,880 crore for national highways, and only Rs 550 crore for new schemes in agriculture! Rs 11,635 crore was given to ports, and only Rs 1,000 crore to irrigation, when 64 per cent of the agricultural sector is dependent on the vagaries of the monsoon, and less than one-third of approved projects in irrigation have actually been implemented! The figures in the latest Budget are not much of an improvement. Money has largely been set aside for rural credit, when the reality is that most farmers are committing suicide because they are already severely indebted. Moreover, the poll promise of raising the minimum support price (MSP) to 50 per cent over costs has been forgotten. Urea is in endemic short supply. The recent unseasonal rainfall and hail has destroyed millions of hectares of standing crops. And, the last straw on the proverbial farmer’s back is the hasty ordinance on the Land Acquisition Bill.
The economic vision of this government is all about industrial corridors, national highways, bullet trains and smart cities. India needs these things too. But governments cannot pursue such goals in isolation, oblivious to the needs of another India where suicides are reaching a peak and the plight of the common man is deteriorating. A right balance between competing priorities has to be found, and this government has lost that balance. It will be instructive for the BJP to remember that the maximum number of farmer suicides — 18,241 — took place in 2004. That was the same year the party was talking of “India Shining”.
Author-diplomat Pavan K. Varma is a Rajya Sabha member
