Hyderabad: “Why are farmers from the best of our agricultural communities, the Patels, the Jats and the Marathas on the streets looking for government jobs that don’t even exist?” asked Himanshu, associate professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in conversation with C. Rammanohar Reddy, readers’ editor at Scroll.in, on the topic of ‘Rural India in a Flux’ as part of the 8th Hyderabad Literary Festival going on at Hyderabad Public School.
While acknowledging the anger in rural India about agriculture and lack of jobs for rural youth and surveys indicating an unwillingness to continue with farming, Mr Himanshu said that these were symptoms of a real agrarian crisis that the government was ignoring.
He went on to point out that these proud farming communities which shouldered the Green Revolution and who would have otherwise considered it below their dignity to take up a government job are burning buses in desperation, demanding a government job even as a peon.
These farmers ironically also happen to come from the top five richest, industrialised and urbanised states in the country. Himanshu elaborated that “the crisis that is not about one crop or one category of farmers or a state but is widespread across the country. There are 14 major states where farmers are on the streets.”
“There is a clear change happening in the production and market systems and the way society and state is dealing with agriculture. That kind of change is normal in all agricultural economies. The problem is not the change, but the inability of the government to understand what the change is all about. And the change that started in the production systems is now a crisis of joblessness.”
How do we deal with the problem of too many people in agriculture? Mr Himanshu believes that to create non-agricultural jobs the government must, as odd as it may seem, invest more in agriculture. Interestingly, agriculture alone can create non-agricultural jobs.
“Farmers are entrepreneurial. The biggest innovation being the Green Revolution was done by a mass of illiterate farmers without any access to technology. Their ability to innovate is phenomenal.”
With 650 million Indians dependent on agriculture, the agrarian crisis is real, huge and complex. “Even if this goes down to 300 million, there will be still enough numbers. We are not in a situation where it is disappearing.”
Mr Himashu sees the solution only through the state’s intervention. “The state is the only agency which can coordinate where millions of people of different backgrounds are involved. The state must be able to regulate in terms of markets, loans, ecology and diffusion of technology. That is something nobody else can do but the state. Unfortunately, neither the state nor the central governments is doing anything.” “If we want our farmers to stay in villages in,we ought to be asking is not what farmers are doing but what we as a society and state are doing.”
The writer is the founder and CEO, Y-Axis Overseas Careers.
