Wednesday, January 30, 2008

In the film `Gandhi', Kasturba has a dialogue which goes something like this, ``Our people are starving because we are wearing clothes made by foreigners.'' Mahatma Gandhi then makes the historical exhortation sparking a bonfire of Lancashire mill cloth that could supposedly be seen right up to England.
Even as we continue to debate the relevance of the epostle of peace and non-violence in these post-modern times of high-value stress and complex economics, this statement has a certain currency that's hard to ignore. There is a sense of anticipation about this side of India. The GDP is seriously looking at a euphoric 10 per cent, much like the sensex (till the day before); the economists and the world have approved of us-- our increasingly globalised environment in which Monsanto has a field day, supermarkets and malls stock only MNC brands, movies in multiplexes are out of reach for the lower middle class, and a consumerist lifestyle propped up on loans and the strengthened rupee to give us a leg up on the social ladder.
Sure, we need to be bullish -- our industrial performance is glowing, we have given the world Nano (after the zero), the gross personal wealth (no pun intended) of the Ambani bros spurs many on to similar marathons, the sundry takeovers of foreign companies achieved and planned but never dreamed, the no-end-in-sight BPO boom, and so on.
But there is another India we have lost sight of, which is not with us or within sighting distance. They are still grappling with bread-and-butter issues, even as we bake cakes by the dozen.For the past ten years, more are more of Them are being driven to suicide. The scene in the countryside is grim: rotting onions, poor yields due to scarcity of power and water, private loans that grow into an endless debt trap and the inevitable albatross of a daughter's wedding.
The fact is that we have doggedly refused to look right and left and perhaps, behind us. It doesn't matter to us that, in the anxiety to impress the world outside, we have rode roughshod over our own. We have not paused to see whether we are all moving together.
Our incomprehensible approach to growth is one of the reasons Gandhiji is so, so relevant today. In one of his initial speeches at an INC meeting, he had pointed out, after Mohammed Ali Jinnah made a stirring speech demanding direct action, that we need to identify with the farmer, the villager and see what he wants. A bunch of people sitting on towns and cities cannot decide India's future, he had argued.
He could well have been making the point today, except that few would bother to hear him out. We have as agriculture minister a man better known as the president of the Board for Control of Cricket in India. Each time a cricketer or cricket is in crises, or egos are being rubbed, Sharad Pawar materialises, either on the right side or the wrong, either making a point or never getting at it, but always, feverishly, on the job. His job as a minister doesn't actually take a back-seat, it is simply never on the horizon. If he could, he would probably ask all farmers to stop worrying and play cricket, a la Marie Antoinette.
As for the governments, they don't even give a farmer the freedom to call his suicide a suicide. Government norms make it almost impossible for a hapless farmer's death to qualify for a `suicide' status.
The intellectuals of the world will froth forever over the topicality of the Mahatma but to those who can see the disconnect, we never needed him more than now-- as early as yesterday.

Friday, January 04, 2008

This is a must-read.

Saw P Sainath on the Lok Sabha channel on TV the other day talking about something extremely close to my heart.
Listening to him was such a novel experience, wired as the brain is to expect trite and more trite baloney from all channels these days, whether they peddle soaps, news or reality. And here was a senior journalist who has travelled across the length and breadth of the country telling us in grim pictures how we have utterly and completely lost all sense of reality and sanity, how the threatened existence of Shah Rukh's pony tail assumes much more national importance than a similar plight of almost half our countrymen in another part of the world.
Dividing these two worlds is this very tangible, visible line that permits a one-way movement: stepping over the threshold in our charmed land of plenty (and sponging up some more of our seemingly infinite space) becomes necessary for many of the deprived lot on the other side but, on the happening side of the divide, we are too happy chasing our material dreams to look behind and check whether the larger lot is catching up.
What he said makes nonsense of our nauseous evolution to the top of the human pile as most see it. He asks the most pertinent question of the century: Where is our sense of outrage? Indeed. Though only some of the text of his speech is reproduced her and not really in Sainath's words, it's mostly him paraphrased, or edited or changed in some way simply because I couldn't keep pace with his speed (sigh! getting older) and also because I can't any more understand my shorthand! With apologies to Sainath for producing the text in slightly arbitrary form, with some missing links (deliberately left as they are because I feared introducing some meaning that may not have been meant) and with some new links (wherever I thought the import/meaning could stay undisturbed), here it is. The errors and misintrepretations are all mine and may please be forgiven:
``India ranks 126th in the human development index and has a life expectancy less than Bolivia's, the poorest country in Latin America. We have around one lakh billionaires even as 800 million continue to exist in the same country on less than Rs 20 a day. There is no such thing as an Indian reality. There are multiple realities.
Our impressive growth rate is just one of them. While the Indian CEOs's salaries are soaring, farm income has declined. The average monthly per capita farm expenditure, according to the NSS, is Rs 503, close to Rs 477, the BPL figure for India. About 55 % of this amount is spent on food and 18 % on clothing. Fuel and other needs make up the rest. This leaves precious little for education or health in a country which has the sixth most privatised health system in the world.

In terms of food, the average rural family is actually consuming 1 kg less than it did 10 years ago. We can clear an SEZ in six months but not land reforms in 60 years. Tenancy and other issues continue to dog the farmer even today. The compensation (doled out by the government during crises) often goes to the absentee landlord and not the farmer.
Globally, coffee prices are booming but the man who grows it in Kerala is committing suicide. Farm data, which started getting recorded only in 1995 by the National Crime Records Bureau, shows that there were 1,12,000 suicides between 1997 and 2003. Ironically, two-thirds of the suicides occur in one-third of the country's population, and mind you, in cash crop areas (not food crops, as commonly misunderstood). In the last 50 years, we have driven people to cash crops and now we are paying the price for that growth -- we are governed totally by the volatility of price movement.
Maharashtra, with a huge base of cash crop cultivation, is the worst affected. One offshoot of this haphazard `growth' is that the number of women farmers in this state is increasing because the men have migrated. But, if the woman farmer or the elder son looking after the farm commit suicide, it is not regarded as a farmer suicide because the land is not in their name. Yavatmal, with an astounding number of suicides, is facing this problem acutely. For any suicide to be counted as the farmer suicide in government's logbooks, it has to be committed by the farmer in whose name the land stands. Again, private money-lending debt is not accepted, only bank debts are. So the hapless farmer's suicides is not considered a farmer suicide.
In our official documentation of farmer suicides, we record the last cause such as fight with the wife, etc., even though every suicide owes to a multiplicity of causes. Debt and other cultivation issues rarely figure as immediate causes, further blotting out facts. There were 2,832 suicides in Vidarbha in 2006, according to police station records, but only 538 were deemed eligible for the compensation doled out by the government. Most suicides are accounted for as farmers' relatives.
For a farmer, farming has become too expensive. Cultivation costs are extremely high. From Rs 2500 per acre in ...., it has jumped to Rs 13,000 per acre for farmers who are using the new Bt brand of cotton seeds. We are moving towards corporate farming. Agricultural universities are doing research for Monsanto.
Let's look at Vidarbha.Today, the Vidarbha issue (suicides) is being kept alive only by stringers and local journalists of the area. There are 17.64 lakh households (families) in Vidarbha out of which 4.31 lakh, that is 75 % of farmer households, are in maximum distress. Three lakh families have serious problems getting their daughters married. It's an explosive situation.
I happened to witness a most heart-wrenching and, at the same time, enriching moment in a farmer's house in Vidarbha. The farmer had no money to marry off his daughter and decided to get her married with a few other girls to save money. When he saw he didnt have Rs 300 to buy her a wedding dress of Rs 300, he sank into a depression and committed suicide on her wedding day. The bride was naturally shattered and refused to go ahead with the wedding, But she was persuaded, because the family couldn't afford to postpone it! They had already spent all they had on the preparations.
There was a worse, more heart-wrenching moment, to be lived when the father's funeral procession crossed the daughter's wedding procession. The bride wept copiously, uncontrollably. I cannot fathom what must have gone through her young mind to be married in such circumstances. But we read mostly about lavish weddings such as that of Lakshmi Mittal's daughter.
There was one moment though that I felt proud of witnessing. The entire community had
pitched in bit by bit to buy the bride her dress. All of them were poor farmers, trapped in similar economic strife, but they had the humanity to save a dying situation.
There are three reasons why suicides shoot up. Someone called me the other day to say I can buy a Mercedes Benz at 6% interest without any collateral but farmers are committing suicide because they cannot get a decent interest rate for a loan of Rs 8,000. Where's our sense of outrage?
Secondly, health is the second largest component of rural debt. There is no one to bail him out.
The spiralling inputs costs are the third factor driving farmers to kill themselves. A whole new class of moneylenders has emerged -- companies selling seeds and other inputs for the farms have now got into the picture.