Some years ago the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) reported after its study on agriculture that roughly half the farmers in the country did not wish to continue farming.
“They would rather quit if they had an alternative. This shameful reality reflects the despair farmers feel and is based on the fact that agriculture is a loss making enterprise and the farmers are unable to either feed themselves or turn a profit,” says Dr. Suman Sahai, Convener, Gene campaign, New Delhi in her blog (sumansahai-blog.blogspot.com) on Why farmers don't farm.
Dr. Sahai, a genetic scientist, served as faculty member at Universities of Chicago and Heidelberg, is convenor of the Gene Campaign, an organization dedicated to protecting farmers' rights and food and livelihood security.
It also provides training to farmers in adapting the fragile agriculture of the dryland to the growing uncertainty of global warming and climate change.
Dr. Sahai has been honoured with a number of international and national awards and including the Padmashri recently.
“Rural India is looked down upon by the well to do urban population, including the policy makers, who are seen as part of the urban elite. This discrimination strips farming and the farmer of his dignity and provides an incentive to the younger generation to move away from farming,” she says.
Raised on a diet of unreal aspirations beamed on television soap operas and Bollywood films, rural youth sees neither glamour, money nor dignity in farming.
Why would they want to adopt it if there is nothing there for them?” she asks.
“Electoral politics plays with rice and wheat as gimmicks to get votes. The poor must certainly get the help of the state to overcome hunger and poverty but the way to do this should be empowerment and fostering self reliance — not creating dependency through doles,” she mentions in her blog.
Only one crop
Uncertain rainfall and drought in the last three years has made farming even more risky than before. In Jharkhand, farmers can harvest only one crop in the year during the monsoon.
Because there is no irrigation, they are unable to plant a second crop in the winter as farmers in the irrigated regions of Punjab and U.P can.
Farm losses become even higher if the single crop too fails, creating a crisis of hunger for farm families.
The coping mechanism for such a situation is to abandon farming and seek work as manual labour since that brings assured income, which farming does not.
“Abandoning farming now makes economic sense to the farmer. In Jharkhand, in a family with five members, if four go out to seek manual work in mines or at construction sites, they collectively earn about Rs.300 per day at an average wage rate of Rs.75 per person which is below the minimum wage.
“And it is money that comes into their hands at the end of the day. This makes the average monthly income of the family Rs. 9,000 per month, or Rs. 1.8.000 per year,” explains Dr. Sahai.
This is several times that they can ever dream of earning from farming .
Expensive
According to her, in the farmer's calculation, agriculture is expensive, risky and requires back breaking work which does not even bring enough to eat, let alone any surplus.
On top of all this, it carries the near certain burden of debt since in order to coax his single crop out of the ground, the farmer needs to take credit to procure inputs like seed and fertilizer, sometimes even water. “In another scenario, the BPL card holder gets 35 kg of rice at Rs 1 per kg and 3 litres of kerosene oil per month for cooking. This subsidized grain lasts for fifteen days in the month, for the other fifteen days he purchases food from the market with the money the family has earned from manual labour.
“On the other hand, here is what many farmers recounted about their experience with hybrid rice cultivation. Hybrid rice is promoted aggressively by government agencies although all the hybrid rice seed is being sold by private companies and there is not a single public sector hybrid rice variety available on the market.
No investment
Farmers bought hybrid rice seed at about Rs 250 per kg, planted the nursery and at the time of transplantation, the rains failed. Since there is no investment in rainwater conservation, there are no water bodies and life saving irrigation is not available to save the crop.
“So, after investing between 3,000 to 4,000 rupees, the farmers got about 50 to 60 kg of rice from the entire kharif crop. Compare this with the 35 kg rice that they get for Rs 35, every month. Why would the farmer farm?” she asks.
Many in the younger generation are forgetting how to farm. Two more generations of this kind of youth and we may not have enough people who can grow food in this country — and then?” she asks.
Readers can contact Dr. Suman Sahai at mail@genecampaign.org, J-235/A, Lane W-15C, Sainik farms, New Delhi- 110-062, phone:011- 29556248 and 29555961.