Gathering gloom

By Supriya Roy Chowdhury

DURING 1999-2001, 110 farmers committed suicide in Karnataka. A great deal of attention was drawn to these events in the initial phases, primarily through the media. More recently, however, it appears that suicides of farmers have become part of regular news, generating neither public outrage nor governmental response. In September, 2001 alone, 30 farmers committed suicide in different areas of rural Karnataka. Farmers' suicides in this State are now only an added dimension in the broader issue of rural development, represented by one more set of Government files and documents.

The suicides began in some districts of northern Karnataka, and rapidly spread to the southern parts. While poverty is endemic in rural Indian households, the desperate self-expression of poor farmers in these fairly widespread self-killings perhaps marks the onset of intensified deprivations. Most of the suicides have happened in areas where the primary crop is toor dal. These are areas of dryland farming where the cost of cultivation is high. While the price of toor dal earlier ranged from Rs. 1,800 to Rs. 2,600 a quintal, imports in recent years have pushed prices down to as low as Rs. 1,200 a quintal. A number of other produce - maize, pulses, oilseeds, coconut, and arecanut - are now imported at subsidised rates under the OGL. Prices of all of these have fallen, causing great hardship to rural households already at the edge of poverty.

The drop in prices has caused farmers to borrow heavily, for production and consumption purposes. A widely-noted factor in the current rural distress appears to be the kind of credit that is available to poor farmers. In large parts of Karnataka, cultivation is carried out in a context of high concentration of land, not reflected in land records. Land is leased out to tenant farmers under unprotected and casual forms of tenancy. Lacking any kind of formal title to land, poor peasants are typically perceived as credit unworthy by commercial banks. Under these circumstances, the marginal peasant is forced to seek loans from non- institutional sources, highly extractive and extortionist in nature, and where interest rates are as high as 60 per cent per annum.

During the Janata Dal rule in Karnataka, a fund was set up, with Central Government finances, to facilitate Government purchase of crops through support prices. The volume of Government purchase, however, has been slow and inadequate and has had minimal impact in terms of price support. Procurement centres are few, and are often inaccessible to growers.

Farmers' protests began from around 2000, led by the Karnataka Pranta Raita Sabha, and other organisations. There have also occurred spontaneous protests by farmers. Such protests have demanded not only the reduction of imports and higher remunerative prices, but have also pressed for rescheduling of debts by commercial banks and cooperative credit societies, greater emphasis on institutional lending, and more rigorous controls on private lenders.

The prospects for these protest movements, however, need to be seen in the levels to which they are being articulated. Typically, such movements are locally confined and are articulated primarily towards the State Government. In the context of broader international political economy forces pushing for globalisation in general and for the WTO in particular, the farmers' movement may well be up against adversaries who are not only infinitely more powerful, but are also not accessible to such movements. State and national Governments could supposedly act as moderating intermediaries between local and global interests. In India's democratic polity, the peasantry is of course a critical constituency, at least demographically. But the response of Governments to peasant needs is possibly shaped, at any given time by political economy factors which preclude simple electoral equations. Farmers' demands to reduce imports obviously go against the current logic of trade liberalisation that is being pursued by the Central Government within the broader framework of the WTO.

There are other ways in which the new market orientation has worked against the interests of poor rural households. For example, in the new context of economic liberalisation, the history of low levels of loan recovery from rural households became a major reason for the declining emphasis on social banking in rural areas. Thus there has been a fall in total bank lending to the priority sectors, from 35 per cent in 1980-81 to 22 per cent in 1997- 98. Within this overall decline, agricultural lending fell from 15 per cent in 1980-81 to 10 per cent in 1996-97. Thus the numerical weight of the poor obviously has not prevented shifts in policies in directions which are obviously not pro-poor.

In the current year, the State has witnessed an extreme drought, situation, destroying cultivation of a whole range of crops, and likely to intensify peasant distress in a major way. In a State where only 25 per cent of the land is irrigated, the large majority of farmers are exposed to the risks of rain-fed agriculture. On the part of the Government, long-term programmes such as crop insurance are currently being considered. But the institutional mechanisms, through which such insurance would be implemented, are yet to be worked out. In the meantime, the Government does not have any specific scheme for providing relief to families of farmers who have committed suicide. Support is available from the Chief Minister's General Relief Fund, but only after a magisterial inquiry has properly ascertained the circumstances in which the farmer's death took place.

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