‘Our budgets are tanking’

As winter crops reach harvest, Krushna Ambulkar is out every day at 7 a.m to start his door-to-door vasuli, a property and water tax recovery drive.

“Farmers [here] are so poor that achieving 65 per cent of the target is huge,” says the lone panchayat employee in Zamkoli.

Zamkoli is 75 kilometres from Nagpur and inhabited by Mana and Gowari (Scheduled Tribe) communities who are mostly marginal and small farmers cultivating drylands. Farmers grow cotton, soybeans, tur, and even wheat if they have a well or borewell. Forty-year-old Krushna is the only OBC in the village – a Nhavi (barber) by caste.

A far cry from New Delhi’s claims about agriculture being the focus of the budget this year and jubilation over tax cuts for the middle classes, Ambulkar is tense over the panchayat’s tax recovery and the village farmers worry about sluggish crop prices.

Krushna’s worry is easily explained: The catch is, if he fails, he does not get paid his salary of Rs. 11,500 that comes from the panchayat tax revenue of Rs. 5.5 lakh.

“Our production costs have doubled or tripled; mahagai [inflation] is eating into our savings,” says the village sarpanch from Gowari community, Sharada Raut. The 45-year-old also works as a farm labourer herself, in addition to tilling the family land of two acres.

Crop prices have stagnated or fallen: soybeans are selling almost 25 per cent below the minimum support price of Rs. 4,850 a quintal; cotton prices are stagnant at Rs. 7,000 a quintal for years and tur is hovering at Rs. 7-7,500 a quintal, just about at par with the MSP which is low to begin with.

The sarpanch says not a single family earns more than Rs. 1 lakh annually from all sources. That, incidentally, is the amount that someone from the lowest tax bracket will save, says the recent Union Budget.

“We don’t know anything about the government budget,” Sharada says and quips, “but we know our budgets are tanking.”