Amy Kazmin in New Delhi June 8, 2017
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party is preparing to waive billions of dollars in farmers’ loans, as it confronts an upsurge of unrest from angry cultivators who are demanding debt relief and higher prices for agricultural commodities. Six farmers have already been killed in confrontations.
In a note to clients this week, BofA Merrill Lynch predicted nearly $40bn in farmers’ debts — equivalent to about 2 per cent of GDP — would be waived before India’s next general election in 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi hopes to secure a renewed mandate for the following five years.
Mr Modi opened the floodgates for a series of costly farm loan write-offs during the recent Uttar Pradesh election campaign, when he promised that the BJP would forgive nearly $5.6bn owed by more than 21.5m small farmers if it came to power. Yogi Adityanath, the state’s newly anointed chief minister, moved to fulfil that promise at his first cabinet meeting.
Now the demand for debt relief has spread across rural India, where livestock markets have also been roiled by new rules to restrict the sale of aged bovines for slaughter.
In Maharashtra — also governed by Mr Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP — protesting farmers have withheld produce from the markets for nearly six days, leading to shortages and sharp increases in the prices of fruit, vegetables and fresh milk in cities such as Mumbai and Pune.
In response, Devendra Fadnavis, Maharashtra’s chief minister, has promised to write off loans equivalent to $4.6bn owed by farmers with up to five acres of land by October 31.
In neighbouring Madhya Pradesh — where farmers are also demanding loan waivers, protests demanding debt forgiveness turned violent as rampaging farmers set cars on fire and attacked police stations.
In the confrontations on Tuesday six farmers were shot and killed and eight others injured. Farmers have accused police of shooting into the crowd, a charge the state’s BJP government initially denied but later conceded could be true — but which it justified on the grounds of self defence.
The BJP government in Madhya Pradesh has promised financial compensation for those killed in the violence and has said it is ready to hold talks with farmers’ groups to try to address their grievances. But New Delhi has also rushed paramilitary forces to a troubled district of the state where farmers kept up their rampage on Wednesday, burning buses, a highway toll plaza, shops and other property, and attacking police stations.
Meanwhile, farmers in Rajasthan, also a BJP-ruled state, have announced plans for a strike in the coming days — which will include withholding produce from the market — to press for a farm loan waiver in the state.
In the southern state of Karnataka, the BJP, which is in opposition, is publicly demanding that the Congress administration waive farmers’ loans before the state’s next elections in 2018.
Farmers’ debt write-offs have a long and controversial history in India. In 2008, India’s previous Congress-led government waived farm loans equivalent to 1.8 per cent of GDP. The waiver was criticised by some agricultural economists as a populist measure that failed to address farmers’ real problems or sustainably boost their productivity or incomes.
Urjit Patel, Reserve Bank of India governor, has warned repeatedly of the potential long-term economic damage of the “slippery path” of farm loan waivers, which he says will undermine public credit culture and erode public finances — potentially fuelling renewed inflation.
“Farm loan waivers can lead to fiscal slippages and undo the work on the fiscal deficit done over the past two years,” Mr Patel said on Wednesday, after a Monetary Policy Comittee meeting.
Days after Yogi Adityanath approved the farm loan waiver in UP in April, Mr Patel had also spoken out, urging politicians to resist the temptation for such populist measures.
“I think we need to create a consensus that such loan waiver promises are eschewed,” he had said. “Otherwise, sub-sovereign fiscal challenges in this context could eventually affect the national balance sheet.”
According to Moody’s, the credit rating agency, the budget deficits of India’s cash-strapped state governments are a mounting challenge, with their deficits having risen from 2 per cent of GDP in 2012 to 3 per cent now — in addition to the central government deficit.
In its note, BofA Merrill Lynch said it expected the farm debt waivers to be financed by the central government, which would help the states to issue special bonds.
By Prachi Salve, Alison Saldanha and Vipul Vivek
As anger sweeps rural Madhya Pradesh after the death of six farmers in police firing, farm protests roil rural Maharashtra — wholesale markets are shut, produce is being dumped on streets — and governments of the debt-ridden states struggle to respond to demands for loan waivers, an IndiaSpend analysis and reportage from rural Maharashtra explores why farmers are both angry and desperate.
The primary reason farming is unviable in India is that farms are now among the world’s smallest (the global average land-holding size is 5.5 hectares) — too many people are dependent on shrinking farms.
Since 1951, the per capita availability of land has declined by 70 percent, from 0.5 hectares to 0.15 hectares in 2011, and is likely to decline further, according to ministry of agriculture data.
Such “small and marginal land-holdings”, as they are called, now constitute 85 percent of the number of operational farms in the country, according this 2015-16 report on the state of Indian agriculture.
It is hard to use modern machinery on small farms, the owners of which are often too poor to afford farm equipment. Manual labour increases costs, but labour too has been in short supply, as workers migrate to cities. Further, their size and output limits access to loans and institutional credit.
Those are the larger issues. Here are the three reasons for the current turmoil, gleaned by IndiaSpend’s analysts and reporters:
1. After back-to-back droughts, a good harvest, but incomes fall
As 2017 rolled in, the news from India’s farms appeared good.
After droughts in 2014 and 2015, a good monsoon in 2016 reversed two years of rural economic decline. India’s agricultural growth contracted 0.2 percent in 2014-15 and grew no more than 1.2 percent in 2015-16, because of the back-to-back droughts. In 2016-17, the agricultural economy grew 4.1 percent.
Across many states growing pulses, such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana and Gujarat, markets were flooded with produce, especially tur (pigeon pea), which witnessed the highest growth among all pulses, an important source of protein for a majority of Indians. India is the world’s largest pulses producer.
However, an influx of pulses from Myanmar, Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi–growing 20 percent over two financial quarters, from September 2016 to March 2017, The Business Standard reported on March 3, 2017–caused the price of Indian tur to plunge.
From Rs 11,000 per quintal (from December 2015), the price of tur fell 63 percent to Rs 3800-4000 per quintal — 20 percent below the minimum support price (MSP)–the price at which government buys farm produce–of Rs 5,050 per quintal (including a bonus of Rs 425) since December 2016 as Indiaspend reported on 12 April, 2017.
The table above explains how production of pulses rose 29 percent, from 17.15 million tonnes in 2014-15 to 22.14 million tonnes in 2016-17. Tur production increased 50 percent, from 2.81 million tonnes to 4.23 million tonnes, over the same period.
The MSP for tur should be increased to Rs 6,000 per quintal in 2017 and Rs 7,000 per quintal in 2018, a government committee headed by chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian recommended in September 2016.
Minimum Support Price For Pulses For Kharif (July to October) Crops 2016-17 and Rabi (October to March) Crops 2017-18
As on March 2017, the minimum support price for tur was Rs 5,050 per quintal, nearly 20 percent (18 percent) lower than the prices recommended by the committee on pulses.
As these prices crashed, farmers found it harder to find money to store their produce and prepare for the next season because demonetisation–the withdrawal of 86 percent of India’s currency, by value, on November 2016 –left them starved of cash.
2. How demonetisation — and government red tape — left farmers short of cash
On 18 May, at around noon, 30-year-old Prashant Lande waited under a harsh summer sun to sell 800 quintals of tur at the Amravati agricultural produce market committee (APMC), 664 km east of India’s financial capital, Mumbai.
From Kinhala village in Amravati district’s Ashti taluka, in Maharashtra’s eastern region of Vidharbha, Lande said he refuses to sell his 800 quintals of tur to the government procurement centre, although the state buys tur at a higher rate.
At the market, Lande could sell his tur at Rs 3,800 to Rs 4,000 per quintal, while the government buying centre offered Rs 5,050 per quintal.
“We don’t sell to the government centre because the process of selling takes one month — from standing in line for the token to the sale to finally when the payment reaches the account,” said Lande. “Our fellow farmers who have sold their produce at the procurement centre on March 22, are yet to receive their payments and it is nearly June!”It does not help that the effects of demonetisation continue to to be felt across the rural economy.
Right after demonetisation, tomato farmers in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and onion farmers in Maharashtra and Gujarat, were the worst hit as prices fell by 60-85 percent, IndiaSpend reported on January 18, 2017.
With little respite more than six months later, the experiment has aggravated the circumstances leading to the current farmers’ strike.
“By now we should have begun preparing our fields for the monsoons, but because of demonetisation and the unavailability of cash, we are still struggling to find money for sowing,” said Lande.At such a time, farmers like Lande turn to credit.
Up to 57 percent of farm families in Maharashtra are indebted; the figure for India is 52 percent, according to the National Sample Survey Organisation’s 2013 situation assessment survey of farm households, the latest available data.
This indebtedness has widespread consequences. More farmers committed suicide in Maharashtra (4,291) in 2015 than any other state, rising 7 percent from 4,004 in 2014, followed by Karnataka (1,569) and Telangana (1,400), as IndiaSpend previously reported in January 2017.
Now, after Uttar Pradesh’s new government waived Rs 30,792 crore of farm loans, pressure is building on the governments of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to do the same. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has been reluctant to do so, but with his government’s coalition partner, the Shiv Sena, and other parties preparing for a political agitation, he may find it hard to exercise fiscal prudence.
3. In an era of climate change, 52 percent of Indian farmers are without irrigation
The basic problem across most of rural India is that despite the spread of irrigation–a sector plagued by unfinished projects and corruption – 52 percent of India’s farms still depend on the vagaries of rain, which is becoming increasingly uncertain in an era of climate change.
Extreme rainfall events in central India, the core of the monsoon system, are increasing and moderate rainfall is decreasing — as a part of complex changes in local and world weather — according to a clutch of Indian and global studies, as IndiaSpend reported on 15 April, 2015.
The droughts of 2014 and 2015 in rural Maharashtra were mitigated by the plentiful rains of 2016, but many parts of the state also endured floods. Uncertain weather affects the ability of government extension systems to provide accurate advice to farmers.
“The government encouraged us to grow more tur in the kharif (July to October) season, since these crops consume less water and are in high demand,” said Lande, the Vidarbha farmer. “We would not have faced so much loss over the last three years, had there been a proper system of canals.”Despite six decades of irrigation, less than 50 percent (or 66 million hectares of India’s net-cultivated area of 140 million hectares) as irrigated, according to the 2015-16 State of Agriculture report. Groundwater provides water for two-thirds of India’s irrigated land, but those levels are falling from overuse.
From the first five year plan (1951-56) to the eleventh (2006 to 2011), the central government has spent a total of Rs 3.51 lakh crore, as we said, on major irrigation and flood control projects characterised by time and cost overruns, shows this 12th Five Year Plan (2012-2017) report.
On July 1, 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY)–or the Prime Minister’s Farmer’s Irrigation Programme–with a budget of Rs. 50,000 crores over five years (2015-16 to 2019). The motto of the PMKSY is "Har Khet Ko Pani (water to every field)” and “More crop per drop”.
In 2015-16, less than a third (Rs 312 crore) of Rs 1,000 crores set aside for micro-irrigation was released, reveals this government report. Of this, upto April 2016, no more than Rs 48.3 crore, or less than five percent, was actually spent, according this micro-irrigation financial progress monitoring report. The government set Rs 1,763 as the 2016-17 micro-irrigation target, but no data on results have been released.
The micro-irrigation programme covers an area of 6,51,220 hectares, or 0.46 percent of net cultivated area.
Updated Date: Jun 08, 2017 09:42 AM
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