Why do farmers in India get so little attention and sympathy?

Most of the space in newspapers, on television and on news publishing websites is occupied by politics and all the mudslinging and ugliness associated with it. Then there is space for crime and film and sport. So, why doesn’t anybody talk about Rural India and the lives of farmers? Farmers usually make the headlines only when they commit suicide. It’s almost as if their lives don’t matter. Agriculture in India is generally looked at as ‘farmers feeding the people’. Ironically, nobody seems to care much about their welfare. Why such widespread apathy?

Education and health pertaining to farming communities, critical for the well-being of farming households, are not spoken or written about enough. Farmers find it difficult to educate their children and access primary health care. I was recently talking to Madhura Swaminathan, chairperson of the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, about her book, How do Small Farmers Fare? Evidence from Village Studies, which is based on a study, and I asked her these very questions.

Madhura Swaminathan’s response helps give us an idea about how life is being lived in most parts of Rural India 70 years after India’s Independence. In the 25 villages she and her team visited and studied, 50 per cent or more of women above the age of 16 had no years of schooling. “This is the state we are in, she says, “We see big differences – by caste, larger farmers who are now sending their children to hostels and schools in the city. Educational inequality is increasing.” There are new schemes for crop insurance but how do we expect a person with no schooling to deal with such schemes and how will they be implementable, she wonders. What will happen is a few will benefit but the majority will be left out.

“Education is the basic need, it is the future. They are now talking about e-auction and giving market intelligence to farmers, also, e-nam or e-national market. How do we expect such important transactions like price for your output to be done online without electricity or Internet? The design for agricultural policy is coming from urban residents who have hardly gone to a village. We are getting carried away by technology without looking at the underlying problems.”

I then asked Madhura Swaminathan about health, infant mortality and malnutrition. Does the farmer have access to the PHC? Although this did not form part of the study, she referred to covering two villages in Mandya and Kolar. In the first survey done in May, the hot season, most women had only two meals a day. They took their first meal at around 11.30 am or 12, their breakfast comprised ragi or mudde; the second meal was at night. When the team visited during the harvesting season, they found the women were having three meals. “I think on average they are having two meals a day – the first at 12 noon after getting up at 6, sweeping, milking the cow, cooking – they are not sitting idle. It is going to have nutritional effects. We have not paid attention to the question that you are asking. Do these women know thatit is unhealthy to have two meals ten hours apart? Is it the lack of information, is it the constraints of time or something else – these are questions to be studied,” she says.

Incidentally, How do Small Farmers Fare? Evidence from Village Studies is a spin-off of the work that Madhura Swaminathan has been doing with an organisation called the Foundation for Agrarian Studies, a group of academics in India interested in agrarian and rural issues. The book is written in a simple way so that it’s assessable to the general reader. One of the good things is, she and her team head back to the villages and share the findings with farmers and peasant leaders, and also activists.

In 2005-06, MSSRF started a series of village surveys, starting in Andhra Pradesh and the last one was in 2016 in three villages of Tripura. Detailed household surveys were conducted in 25 villages across ten states in India over ten years. Although this book focuses only on one issue – small farmers, how they are doing, their income levels, indebtedness, their access to bank loans, cost of imports – there is considerable data, useful data that should be made available to the Government of India in the hope that it will goad at least a few in the administration to do what is required make the lives of small, marginal and landless farmers in India happier.