You reap, you sow

There is rural distress in Punjab. The farmers are angry — and out on the road and on the rail tracks. This has been in the making for many years. A look at the issues that have the agriculture community on the boil would make that clear. Sugarcane arrears are the result of misgovernance in public sector sugar mills and the tendency of private mills to make a killing in a good year and cry losses in bad. That is a governance failure, just as it was in the white-fly disaster for the cotton crop. Farmers were first cheated by spurious seed sold as Bt cotton, and then serious corruption in the Agriculture Department led to inappropriate pesticides being supplied.

The governance deficit is stark. A major factor in the cotton crisis is the missing farm officers at the village level. There is no one to tell farmers of the agriculture best practices. The basmati logjam, just as the one that a few years ago hit a particular common paddy variety, is the result of poor advice on which varieties to grow. The reason for agricultural staff shortage is lack of funds to pay the salaries, and various non-productive subsidies are to blame for that. After paying the meagre compensation to farmers, the government has gone into a serious overdraft. It is very well for the Chief Minister to say he would never stop free electricity, but he obviously has found no way to pay for it.

Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal was less than tactful when he called the farmers’ agitation politically motivated. It requires extraordinary insensitivity not to recognise that the farm sector is in serious trouble. The fact is it is politically motivated governance that has led to the present state of affairs. With corruption, misgovernance and policy failure coming to bear fruit all together, the government has lost the moral authority to act tough against the farmers, which needs to be done as no one has the right to subject others to suffering, no matter their own misery. The Chief Minister’s dialogue with the agitating farmers has come a day too late.