Pay them well

Agrarian distress is a reality that has only recently impacted urban consciousness, but the politicians have long known the problems that farmers face. Now that the anger of the land tillers is influencing the political fortunes of various candidates, they have resorted to a time-honoured measure of announcing loan waivers. It would be difficult to imagine Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress chief Rahul Gandhi on the same page, but both are trying to outdo the other in announcing sops for farmers.

Within hours of being sworn in, the Chief Ministers of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh fulfilled their poll promise by announcing loan waivers for farmers. Although they may have beaten others in their alacrity to announce the sops, they are by far not the first. Indeed, Prime Minister Modi announced such measures before the UP elections. Till now the states leading in loan waivers are UP, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Punjab and Rajasthan.  Besides being ineffective insofar as it deflects the issue rather than solve the problem, there is also the moral dimension of rewarding the defaulters.

Loan waivers may, charitably speaking, be seen as something of atonement by the political class for failing in its duty of providing proper infrastructure and a remunerative market for the farmers, for whom even a bumper crop turns into a glut that brings about a collapse in prices and financial disaster. The ineffectualness of the Aasha scheme in delivering promised returns and using the taxpayers’ money to bail out banks that provided the loans rather than taking measures that directly help the farmers is disingenuous. The Centre has announced that it has not given any waiver to farmers under the Agricultural Debt Waiver and Debt Relief Scheme for the past three years, yet there will be pressure on the politicians to announce such relief. Farmers need guidance and help in selecting produce that they would be able to sell at a decent price, and in some cases, they need a helping hand to push them over the dire despondency that the present lack of cohesive farmer-centric policies has caused. Such measures may not be populist, but they will have a longer-lasting impact and will be of help to the tillers as also those for whom they till the land.