Agriculture in the age of inequality

Visiting farmers’ homes in 1984, the year Frontline was born, almost the first thing I was met with everywhere was a glass of fresh milk. In some parts of western Maharashtra, you would be given an additional tumbler as you left the household. In coastal Andhra Pradesh, the milk often came in a silver tumbler—a sign of respect for the guest, and a statement of the status of a farmer doing well.

In farm households in Tamil Nadu, you got the milk in pure brass tumblers. Sometimes, that brass tumbler would have fabulous filter coffee. By the 1990s, across many states, the silver tumblers had given way to stainless steel ones. After 1991, they still gave you fresh milk, but now it often came in a cracked piece of crockery, maybe a cup chipped at the edges. By the mid-1990s, I found myself drinking out of glass tumblers.

By 2000, the milk had been replaced by chai. In Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, by 2003-04, it was black chai. The amount of sugar in the tea—conventionally a sign of affection and respect—also kept shrinking. By the middle of that decade, the glass tumbler had disappeared. The small quantity of black chai now came in those hideous plastic cups you get aboard trains and at bus depots.

In 2018, I met the freedom fighter Ganpati Bal Yadav at his home in Sangli, Maharashtra. After an interview lasting some hours, he saw me off with fresh milk. In an aluminium tumbler.

The tumbler and its downward journey are a metaphor for the decline of the farm economy. It also reflects the disastrous impact of economic policies that have allowed private companies to push down milk prices (and that of all other farm produce) at the very time we unleashed “market-based pricing” that allowed price gouging at the consumer end.

These were consciously crafted policies. Including some that led to millions of very young, vulnerable children in farm households going without milk. Farm children denied animal milk because every drop was sold to finance other essentials. Of course, it is not just milk. Look at cotton. In the mid-1970s, a farmer in the Vidarbha region could sell a quintal or two of cotton and buy 10-12 grams of gold. That came in handy at the time of his daughter’s marriage. Today, that farmer cannot buy 10 grams of gold even if she or he sells 10 quintals of cotton.

Although the minimum support price (MSP) declared in Maharashtra is Rs.7,122 a quintal, few get more than Rs.6,500. Even with full MSP, they would get Rs.71,220 for 10 quintals—still less than the cost of 10 grams of gold today. Simply put, they will not be able to buy even 1 gram by selling 1 quintal.

Again, a decline and “transformation” driven by economic policies. The policies and processes set in motion affected many other classes too, here and in most other nations in the world. We saw those, though, in full-blooded display from 1991. Worldwide these included the following:

The withdrawal of the state from sectors and programmes that mattered to the poor. Massive cuts in subsidies to the poorer sections while giant subsidies (renamed “incentives”) were directed towards the rich and the corporate world.

A fall in public investment in agriculture. The rapid diversion of agricultural credit from agriculture to agribusiness. A massive transfer of resources from poor to rich. A huge rise in farmer indebtedness. And the unprecedented rise of corporate power. The privatisation of many public resources, including a 19 kilometre stretch of river in Chhattisgarh.

The privatisation of just about everything, even intellect and soul. And the undermining of local governance, where panchayati raj squared up against corporate power, and lost. As the former RBI Governor Y.V. Reddy might put it: We’ve seen more of rural developments, less of rural development.

And, of course, we continue to see a stunning rise in inequality. The combined value of India’s 217 dollar billionaires, as on December 10, 2024 (according to Forbes) was $1,041 billion. We’re talking a trillion dollars here. That figure is some 58 times India’s agricultural budget of $17.91 billion. And close to 1.8 times our total Budget expenditure of $562 billion. Think of it: 217 individuals (0.000015 per cent of the population) hold wealth equivalent to roughly a third of the GDP.

Over the decades from 1991, we saw the undermining of life-support measures for farmers. The steady undermining of the state-regulated mandis. The planned, chaotic destruction of the public sector, which, in turn, badly damaged farming and farmers. A terrible impact on food output and availability.

The Kafkaesque transformation of agricultural universities from the community-centred institutions they once were to laboratories of corporate agribusiness. The systematic diversion of formal credit away from farmers, which forced tens of millions to turn to the old and new sahukars (moneylenders). A collapse of prices for the farmer, even as they exploded at the consumer level. A look at cultivation costs of cotton in Vidarbha between 2003 and 2013 showed that input prices and the overall cost of cultivation of an acre of cotton rose by 250-300 per cent and, in some cases, even more. But what about farmers’ incomes? Those moved, if at all, at a fraction of the crippling cultivation cost increases, particularly that of seeds.

And income? Even the 77th round of the National Sample Survey, or NSS, the last and latest on farm households, shows that the average monthly income of farm households is around Rs.10,218. Can you think of a single job in the organised sector that does not pay close to double that? And remember, that figure is household, not individual income. And remember, that in 2017, the Narendra Modi government promised to double farmers’ incomes in five years. Well, income from cultivation actually saw a decline of 10 per cent between 2012-13 and 2018-19. Farm households now get more income from wages, salaries, and livestock.

As progressive economists have noted, we saw a globalisation of prices and an Indianisation of incomes.

By 2024, we know that over 4,00,000 farmers have taken their own lives, largely in policy-driven distress. That figure is an official one—and a terrible underestimate.

The wilful destruction of the farmer and the agricultural labourer saw, between Censuses 2001 and 2011, the biggest ever migrations in India. As farming and the larger agrarian economy tanked, tens of millions of people left their villages for cities and small towns. This was not taken to be a bad thing. It was poorly covered, if at all, barring in Frontline and The Hindu. “We have to get millions out of agriculture,” was the cry of neoliberal economists. Fine. But were those millions consulted? Did they have a choice? What options were they offered?

Even if you feel it essential to move many farmers out of agriculture, you do not do it without their participation in the decision-making. You do not do it by destroying agriculture and the lives of agriculturists.

The development economist Prof. K. Nagaraj says that you can think of it when you have “(a) improvements in agricultural productivity; (b) creation of good quality, decent employment in both rural and urban areas; and (c) provision of good education and healthcare to all so that a skilled, healthy workforce develops. In reality, exactly the opposite happened. And then you use mass distress migration from rural areas as evidence of ‘improvements’ in agriculture!”

Note that the population of farmers in India has gone up in every census after Independence, including 1991. Then there is a stunning collapse. Census 2001 saw a fall in full-time or “main cultivator” farmers of 7.2 million, yes million. Census 2011 recorded a further fall in their numbers of 7.7 million.

In short, in the first 20 years after we embraced the “new” economic policies, India’s farmer population fell by almost 15 million. That is, on average, over 2,000 full-time (or “main cultivator”) farmers were quitting agriculture every 24 hours. Had this happened in almost any other occupation, certainly with urban-based businesses and professions, you would never have heard the end of it. But to the extent it figured in public discourse, it was the voices of corporate-friendly economists that dominated. And they said it was a good thing.

A total of 11,290 persons involved in farming committed suicide in 2022, according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data. This is equivalent to at least 30 farmer suicides every day or more than one every hour. The 2022 figure was higher than the 10,881 suicides recorded in 2021, 10,677 in 2020, and 10,281 in 2019.

It did come up in a rather perverse way during the “reverse migrations” of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tens of millions of rural people doing menial jobs in cities—many among them skilled farmers—headed back to their villages during the COVID-19 pandemic. In just 25 days, in May 2020, the Railways reported that their Shramik (labour) trains had carried 9.1 million workers back to their homes.

This sparked a lot of bleeding-heart anguish. “Why are they going back? It’s too risky. They have a better chance of survival in the cities….”But the anguish was really over the loss of cheap labour in our cities. “Why are they going back” was not the right question. A better one was, why did they leave their villages to come here in the first place?

The answer to this is in two words: agrarian crisis.

The reverse exodus could not have happened if there had been no distress migrations to the cities in the first place. The scale of those migrations brought the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme (MNREGA) under huge pressure, and the government was forced to spend more money on it. But the scheme is again being undermined, financially and otherwise.

The scorching levels of distress also saw the rise of major farmer protests. The first of these happened in the last decade, with the historic march of 40,000 of some of the poorest, mainly Adivasi, farmers from Nashik to Mumbai in March 2018. The more recent one was the stunning kisan andolan at the gates of Delhi in 2020-21. Did the mainstream media ever tell you that this was the largest peaceful, democratic, and constitutional protest anywhere in the world in the past 30 years? The globally celebrated Occupy Wall Street movement involved just thousands of idealistic young people who were turfed out of New York’s Zuccotti Park after only nine weeks. The farmers’ protest in Delhi lasted 54 weeks and ended only when three farm laws were repealed.

Prime Minister Modi claimed it was because he had failed to persuade a “small section of farmers” that the laws were in their interest. He did not mention that the tools of persuasion had included tear gas, water cannons, concertina barbed wire, giant container barricades, lathi charges, and digging up of the national highway to stop the tractors carrying the farmers from advancing.

In the three decades since 1991, the farm crisis has merged with the crisis in the larger agrarian society. Accompanied by an employment crisis, a migrations crisis, and a water, health, and education crisis. And more. And all the while, the suicides by farmers (including agricultural labourers) has continued. The government’s answer is to grossly fiddle with the methodology of the National Crime Records Bureau. The result is that the farm suicides data after 2014 are not comparable with that of the preceding 19 years for which data exist.

FACT: the suicides are NOT the agrarian crisis; they are its most tragic result. They are its outcome, not its origin. Its consequence, not its cause.

Here is the agrarian crisis in five words: Corporate hijack of Indian agriculture.

The process by which that is achieved, to quote Prof. K. Nagaraj, in five words: predatory commercialisation of the countryside. The outcome of that process in five words: largest displacements in our history. Perhaps in human history.

When the largest body of landowning smallholders in the world battles for survival, you sense that we could actually be looking at a civilisational crisis. A crisis that can no longer be measured merely in terms of production lost, or even in terms of the horrendous loss of human lives, but by our own loss of humanity, of the shrinking boundaries of our compassion, our humaneness.

A version of this article was first published in Frontline magazine on Dec 25, 2024.