People's Democracy

THE West Bengal Left Front government will introduce a new agricultural policy from the next month. The core content of the policy will be that small farm management will be encouraged and no credibility will be given to the idea that corporate agricultural production alone can push up productivity.

The projected profile of the concept of small farm management will comprise a further firming up of the strong agricultural base the state already possesses, and a concerted attempt at improvement of both the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of the process of production.

The small farm management aims at enhancing the scope of agricultural earnings of the small and marginal farmers. The new agricultural policy may enable them to withstand the jostle of the market at a time when the mantra of "market economy" is being chanted like a panacea by the ruling classes. The new agricultural policy will allow the small peasants to fight for a place in the economy, basing their strength on productivity and profitability.

The new policy will maintain a balance between the production of food crops and cash crops. It seeks to make the state cross the last hurdles remaining towards achieving self-sufficiency in food production.

The Left Front government’s new agricultural policy sharply stands in opposition to the basic dictum of the corporatisation of the agricultural sector that revives the dead-and-gone dream of the "green revolution" of Ford Foundation parentage. It pontificates on the emergent necessity of reorganising all the cultivable and irrigated land parcels into large chunks measuring 1000 to 2000 acres each. The plots would then be handed over to the ubiquitous transnational corporations, of whom the present union dispensation is so enamoured. The corporate houses plan to inject hefty amounts of capital inputs into the farm scene and hope to get big returns.

But the entire process ignores the presence of the massive army of small and marginal peasants and the millions of agricultural workers, including the upari and the gathkuli or the migrant agricultural worker. The process is also based on the fallacious logic that large farms alone can guarantee an enhanced pace of agricultural production.

The Bengal experiment has already provided concrete evidence a long back that smaller plots do contribute to an increase in agricultural production in an impressive manner. It has also been proved beyond doubt that smaller parcels of abaadi or cultivable land provide the maximum number of the rural poor a means of livelihood way beyond subsistence.

The statistical profile of the peasants and the rural poor in West Bengal provides a very strong case for the implementation of the small farm management policy (see Tables 1 and 2).

Table 1

Source: Department of Rural Development, Government of West Bengal

Table 2

Source: ibid

To improve the condition of the rural poor, the new agricultural policy will strive to set up service cooperatives with the participation of the small and marginal farmers. These cooperatives will take the necessary initiative towards improving such essential secondary services as integrated pest management and will ensure the consistent supply of a wide array of core apparatus to the farmers, ranging from high-yield seed inputs to micronutrients to ploughshares to tractors.

The cooperatives will be set up in such a manner as to provide jobs for the unemployed young men and women in villages. These cooperatives will also look after the marketing of the products, and provide storage facilities and transportation to the market places. The new agricultural policy is designed to evolve as a comprehensive package that will cover most of the essential aspects of farm management.

APART from the state units of the central trade unions, virtually every other unit of the public and private sector enterprises has declared to involve itself in making the all-India strike action on April 16 a big success. Apart from the Left-led trade unions, the state units of the BMS, too, has expressed its firm resolve to take part in the strike. State CITU general secretary Chittabrata Majumdar has told INN that the day would virtually prove to be a general strike in the state.

The fervour with which various trade unions and the associations of workers and employees have come forward in support of the strike action, explained Majumdar, "is a direct fall-out of the extent to which the anti-people policy of the BJP-led union government has caused deep anger among the mass of the people in general and the workers and employees in particular."

Apart from the employees of the banks and the mercantile offices, coal workers and employees, transport workers, construction workers and ICDS workers, the municipal workers and employees as well as the state level coordination committees of state and central government employees too have declared their extensive support for the strike action.

NO retrenchment of the workers and employees will accompany the revival package for the 116 coalmines under Eastern Coalfields Ltd (ECL). This decision was arrived at a meeting held at the Writers Buildings in Kolkata recently where the Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, union coal minister Ram Vilas Paswan and the CITU’s all-India general secretary Dr M K Pandhe were present.

Later, Bhattacharya told the media that the decision not to retrench the workers and the employees would be held as valid even in the case of 20-odd coalfields that were running at a loss. The concerned workers will be shifted to some other profit-making coalfield.

A decision not to privatise the coalmines was also taken. Contractors will be engaged in open cast mining ventures alone. However, as Bhattacharya informed the mediapersons, none of the trade unions working amongst the coalmine workers was willing to accede to this clause. A meeting will be held between the ECL and the trade unions on April 20 to try to resolve the impasse in this regard.

Dr M K Pandhe informed the media that the ECL "has designs to reduce the current workforce in the coalmines from 1.20 lakh to 1.04 lakh." Various ways and means were being consistently sought and put to use to introduce a comprehensive and onerous VRS drive. Dr Pandhe also condemned the ECL decision to retrench no less than 9,000 women workers. The CITU leader stood opposed to every form of privatisation and said that once the production level could be increased to touch 35 million MT in the next five years, the ECL would become a profitable concern once again.

LEFT Front government’s labour minister Mohd Amin has written to union coal and mining minister Ram Vilas Paswan not to execute the order to transfer 34 employees of the Kolkata branch of the BALCO. The implication of the order, Amin wrote, was intimately connected to the decision to gradually wound up the city branch of the concern itself. A transfer notice has recently been served on 34 of the 39 employees who run the Kolkata branch of the BALCO. Amin also asked Paswan to consider the age of the employees (all of whom are above 50) and to rescind the transfer order. (INN)

THE West Bengal state committee of the CPI(M) has constituted a 16-member state secretariat of the party. The new entrants to the state secretariat are: Madan Ghosh (district secretary of Burdwan), Mridul De (state centre of the party), Gautam Deb (Left Front minister and member of the North 24 Parganas district secretariat), Amitava Bose (district secretary of North 24 Parganas), Dipak Dasgupta (district secretary of Howrah), and Raghunath Kushari (district secretary of Kolkata).

Jyoti Basu, Anil Biswas, Biman Basu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Benoy Konar, Mohammad Amin, Nirupam Sen, Chittabrata Majumdar, Shyamal Chakravarty and Surjo Kanta Mishra remain in the state secretariat.

The state committee acceded to Dipen Ghosh’s request to relieve him of his duties as a member of the state secretariat, on health grounds. (INN)