People's Democracy

Agrarian Policies And Agricultural Labour

  Suneet Chopra

MILLIONS of people in India are now suffering the first consequences of the pro-US agrarian policy that the BJP-led government at the centre is touting as its own since the year 1999-2000. This is when they opened up our trade to five major agro-business multinationals like Monsanto and Cargill, three years earlier than the due date insisted on by the WTO. To add to the distress of agricultural labour who number no less than 150 million today and are the worst off among the rural masses, the number of days of work available have gone down from 123 days a year in the 1970s to as few as 38 days in some parts of the country today. This is because of the shift from food crops to cash crops, the entry of job killing mechanisation in the form of combine harvesters, and the use of pesticides to kill weeds.

OPPRESSED THROWN TO PROFITEERS

In this drive to stoke the dying embers of exploitative relations, the most oppressed and exploited human beings have been thrown to the profiteers as bait. Recently the chief minister of Haryana called on peasants not to use combines for harvesting in the interest of cattle, as these machines do not provide chaff. But he remained impassive in the face of the murder of Dalits who have traditionally been selling hides, as a result of false accusations of cow killing by Hindu fundamentalist cattle pound owners.

Why did this happen? It is some Hindu fundamentalists who have been running private cattle pounds from where Dalits used to buy the carcasses of dead cattle, which they then sold to leather making units. Now as the leather trade has been deregulated by the central government, so they hope to terrorise Dalits out of it. In fact, the BJP-led government has offered them thousands of crores of rupees to force Dalits out of the job. Worse, almost all cottage industries have either been deregulated or are about to be opened up to corporate activity. Rural labour, thus, has not only less work in the fields but has also been deprived of alternative employment in cottage industries.

The result of all this has been devastating. In 1993-94, 190.72 million were employed in the rural areas, while the figure in 1999-2000 remained at 190.94 million, reflecting a decline in rural employment from 60 per cent to 57 per cent of the population. This is the first time this has happened since independence.

THREAT OF STARVATION

The last-ditch alternatives --- the government’s relief schemes like the food for work programme and other rural employment schemes --- have been truncated. If 1,232 million man-days of work were provided under the government’s rural employment schemes in 1995-96, the figure had been systematically reduced to a miserable 486 million man-days in 2000-2001.

In sum, the determination of the BJP-led government at the centre to serve its multinational advisors knows no bounds. They are not worried about the erosion of the purchasing power of nearly half of India’s rural population, especially its growing army of landless rural labourers. This is a criminal lapse, more so in view of the experience of famine in sub-Saharan Africa and also in view of the analysis of leading economists like Amartya Sen who say that famines in the modern world are not the result of any scarcity but of the lack of purchasing power. And it is precisely this purchasing power that the policies of the BJP-led government are attacking.

As a result, hunger, starvation and famine are now no longer a distant threat. The year 2002 has been one in which our country has been hit by a serious drought --- in 321 of 593 districts. Almost no state in the country has been free of it. Our agricultural growth has declined to – 3.1 per cent. But the BJP-led government is unperturbed. The relief it has offered is negligible. Andhra Pradesh has sought Rs 1,210.90 crore as relief but was provided only Rs 163.77 crore. Also, it was given only Rs 6.15 crore out of the Rs 25 crore food aid it had asked for. Uttar Pradesh had asked for Rs 7,539.79 crore but received only Rs 120.95 crore. The food aid it demanded was Rs 20 crore but was given only Rs 2 crore. The granaries of India, Haryana and Punjab, asked for Rs 1,895.98 crore and Rs 3,529 crore respectively. Punjab was given only Rs 101.47 crore while Haryana got even less, Rs 67.23 crore. While Haryana called for grain worth Rs 9.72 crore, what it got was worth only Rs 0.25 crore. It is obvious from this that the BJP government at the centre is unconcerned if people starve. These amounts are, in fact, given as sops and are basically meant for corrupt bureaucrats and those who live off them. The people can starve for all it cares. That is why, even after the drought, the fertiliser price was raised. Worse, the fertiliser factory at Barauni in Bihar has just been closed down.

The public distribution system (PDS), another defence for the people against starvation, has been rendered ineffective by a two-fold attack on it. First, while the people’s capacity to buy has gone down (the people below the poverty line have increased from 39.6 per cent in 1994-95 to over 43 per cent today), the price of wheat has risen by 79 points, that of rice by 66 points, of pulses by 81 points and of groundnut by 75 points. This means that prices have nearly doubled. Even prices of wheat for those below the poverty line were raised by 66 per cent and those of rice by 62 per cent in 2001. The prices for those above the poverty line were raised between 1998-99 and 2000-01 by 85 per cent for wheat and by 61 per cent for rice. It is not surprising then that the offtake went down by 23 per cent almost immediately and grain stocks grew to an unprecedented 64 million tones. The tragedy was that while the rural poor were reduced to eating grass, rats were merrily eating grain stocks. Or else, either these stocks were illegally offloaded or legally sold to wholesalers.

BASIC RESOURCES IN FOR PRIVATISATION

In these conditions, with there being no jobs and no purchasing power with the poorest and most oppressed one third of the Indian population, the only sensible course would have been to give them means for self-employment, like land to grow crops to live on. But the BJP-led government at the centre is actually thinking of reversing even whatever paltry land reforms have taken place and of even taking the resources the 59 per cent of rural poor peasants have, in order to hand them over to corporate houses and multinationals. Some of these lands have been arbitrarily declared forest. In 1950-51 there were 40.5 million hectares of forests. The figure in 1998-99 rose to some 69 million hectares. These are not forest areas, however, but hidden ceiling-surplus lands or those from which the traditional peasants without rights have been driven away, with the powerful taking over the land those peasants had cleared. Now they are farming these lands illegally. The Supreme Court order demanding evictions is implemented only for the poor and the tribal people while the rich and powerful get away with it.

Now, rather than take action against multinationals who are rigging tea garden auctions and ruining small plantations, there is a move to make this an excuse to further dispossess the poor and to make ceiling laws inoperative for pineapple, orange and banana plantations as well. Under these conditions, the tiny plots of land that the poor could hope to get in order to feed themselves in time of distress, will not be available any more, thanks to the government’s policy of reversing the land reforms.

Another resource that is under attack by the government of India, under pressure from the USA and multinationals, is water. India’s people are already vulnerable. In Asia, the availability of water is only 3000 cubic metres per person per year. In India it is even less: 2500 cubic metres per person. And at the present rate of exploitation, when farmers are being allowed to deplete subsoil water freely to support the high yielding and new seed varieties rather than providing them proper irrigation facilities which would harness surface water that is being wasted, we can be expected to face a severe water shortage by 2005. Already the amount of time lost by women having to fetch water from afar is no less than 150 million woman-days a year, costing the families that do it Rs 10 billion a year. Apart from this, 90 million man-days are lost each year on account of water-borne diseases. Some 80 per cent of our children suffer from these diseases, with 7,00,000 dying of them each year. As many as 44 million people suffer from related problems like the presence of fluoride, iron, nitrate, arsenic, heavy metals and salinity. In 1996, no less than 65,000 villages lacked water supply. In 1985, there were only 750 such villages. Clearly, to be properly managed, water needs to be handed over to the people who use it. If tanks are built even on 3 per cent of our land, we can fully preserve our rainwater. Otherwise we will be in a crisis that will be beyond our control.

But the government of India, the World Bank, WTO and the multinationals think otherwise. They are establishing state control over water and bypassing the people. Later this state control can only be expected to become corporate control. In fact, some of our state governments have sold entire rivers to multinationals like Vivendi, Monsanto and Suez, leaving peasants, agricultural labourers and the mass of people at the mercy of profiteers. Thus the water crisis compounds that of employment and resources --- as part and parcel of a strategy of dispossessing the people of their means of living.

NO ALTERNATIVE BUT TO FIGHT BACK

These projects are likely to have far reaching consequences. Take the case of Ganga water being siphoned off to the Sonia Vihar water treatment plant in Delhi, a project being conducted by Suez-Egremont. Built at a cost of Rs 2 billion, it will take water from the Tehri dam through the Upper Ganga canal to Muradnagar and then by pipeline to Delhi. Already the canal is being lined to prevent seepage and farmers are being prevented from digging wells close to the canal, while they lose no less than 630 million litres daily from the very limited amount they receive for irrigation from the canal. The initial discharge of water in the canal was 6,750 cusecs, which was increased to 10,500 cusecs. The length of the canal is 304 km, serving 9.24 lakh hectares of land in western UP, from Hardwar to Etah. Had this diversion not been resorted to, it could have produced 3.3 million quintals of wheat; 5.5 lakh quintals of Basmati rice; 9.3 million quintals of coarse rice and 9.6 million quintals of potatoes. We are diverting the water at this cost from those who are least able to afford it. Similar projects already exist in Tamilnadu, Orissa, Bihar, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and some other states. And it seems that this corporatisation will reduce water resources to dangerously low levels so that we will see sections of people fighting each other for water. We have to take note of this and prevent it from happening.

With this being the state of affairs, agricultural labourers and poor peasants have no alternative but to struggle for guaranteed employment, minimum wages, land and other opportunities for self-employment. Their very survival is at stake today. They have to organise and throw themselves into struggle immediately. There is no time to be lost. The fifth conference of the All India Agricultural Workers Union is to meet in Thrissur (Kerala) on April 4, 5,and 6 April. The union has a membership of 27,07,863 in 14 states of the country. As the largest organisation of agricultural labour in the country, it has the responsibility to give a direction to their struggles against the policies of the BJP-led government at the centre and of the state governments following the dictates of the WTO and World Bank. So we look forward to the conclusion of this conference with a stirring call for action which will be implemented when the delegations return home, in the form of a massive struggle to defend the livelihood and lives of the most oppressed and exploited section of the Indian people.

March 30, 2003