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- Created on 07 January 2017
The Finance Minister’s annual budget speech has emerged as the prism through which one can discern the policy drift or direction of the government of the day. As the speech is also an ideal platform for political posturing, the discerning eye has to segregate wheat from the chaff of budgetary announcements.
Do budget speeches, right from the Independence, reflect any strategy for agricultural development? Do they constitute changing and random initiatives announced with an eye to vote bank? Does the political rhetoric about farmers get transmitted to the ground as inclusive, robust growth of entire farming community? Do the specific measures to mitigate agrarian crisis have the desired impact in the long run? How often is the old wine passed off as new wine to humble farmers?
The answer to such questions would help the farming community take budget speeches in the right perspective. It would be worthwhile to analyze the agricultural content of budget speeches right from the first one, for 1947-48, to the latest one for 2016-17.
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- Created on 02 May 2015
(Image Courtesy: taxindiaonline.com)
“Blind men feeling an elephant.” This pithy comment by renowned agricultural expert, Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, about UPA Government's initiatives to handle agrarian crisis in April 2009 rings in the truth about the current political sympathy war for farmers.
Releasing a book titled Agrarian Crisis in India, Dr. Swaminathan also reportedly dubbed electoral promises for farmers such as cheap loans and food security law as “piecemeal measures, not amounting to holistic and thoughtful policy.”
The entire political class should reflect on this sage observation instead of shedding crocodile tears over agrarian crisis, which is of their own making and which is expected to worsen over the long run.
The foremost cause for agrarian crisis is unremitting fragmentation of farm lands and shrinking size of average farm due to population explosion, an issue which has become virtually a taboo for the Politician-NGO-Media-Judiciary combine that sets the national agenda. It prefers to beat about the bush to avoid taking on the majority that seems to have eternal faith in unchecked procreation.
The number of operational holdings has been increasing in tandem with unsustainable growth in population since the Independence. The number of holdings has almost doubled to 137.75 million 2010-11 from 71.0 million in 1970-71, the year when the first agriculture census was conducted.
Read more: Don’t Debase Agrarian Crisis to a tale of Blind men Describing an Elephant
