My dear Farmers,
First of all I do apologise that I didn’t find any other medium to convey this message to you despite knowing the fact of usage of internet in rural India.
Since my childhood, right from watching chitrahaar (songs like mere desh ki dharti) to 60 thousand crore rs. subsidy to our farmers. Farmers are the center of attraction right from bollywood to national politics. After giving so much since independence what went wrong with this profession which encompasses around 65% of our population. If we say our GDP growth rate is an average of 9% then we can easily assume that people associated with farming sector would have received the same growth.
Then what is the reason behind the suicides of farmers in Vidharba, Maharashtra. It is estimated that on an average a farmer commits suicide in every 8 hours. This figure really hurts. Now, roughly we can see that only 30-35 % population is responsible for this 9% growth.
Certainly not, agriculture plays the major role in our GDP. So, Let me try to answer this big WHY
One of the most reasons is global agriculture prices are soaring for the last two decades. Because every country has subsidised so much for so long that we have surplus stock every where. Above this, spread of new technologies world over has revolutionized this sector. This further adds unemployment to our agriculture crises.
In this era of low prices in world market India would have purchased the stock what we have with us right now and we have to pay even less than the amount we are giving in our subsidies. But, alas! we already have surplus stock.
So, one of the best solution is to diversify the people among other sectors e.g. service sectors. But, its not so easy to move this massive population in other businesses. Then whats next?
Actually, farmer represents a powerful vote bank in all countries. So it is next to impossible to cut these subsidies. The problem is not only the rising stock in India the problem is the huge decline of prices in global market. It doesn’t matter much to the western world or developed countries because they have only 5-10% of population involved in agriculture and also they have very good tax and credit system to cover these subsides.
This big question is still in front of countries like India. The solution is that there should be the global agreement in lower subsidies so that the global surplus of stock declines and eventually price rise and trade expands. What we need a global market to move our stocks. If this happened India will automatically cash its advantage in this sector.
We basically require a global agreement in reduction in agricultural subsidies under WTO or any acceptable international trade unit. But now we have one problem here is that our all agriculture ministers right from the first loksabha wants to give subsidies to their farmer and expect just reverse from other countries.
The bottom line is. Indian farmers don’t need these everlasting subsidies. They just need an international market to trade their products. This is the path of their prosperity.
At last, if we are not giving so much subsidies we can use that money in education, internal security, good highways (without any toll tax) etc etc...
With love,
Dhiraj Srivastava
Reference
http://www.un.org
http://www.globalsubsidies.org/en/subsidy-watch/commentary/the-era-farmers-suicides-subsidies-and-indian-agrarian-crisis
