Farmers were marketing props in the PM’s self-promoting ‘interaction’

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s interaction with farmers across the country on Wednesday, June 20 was a rehearsed affair, in which farmers came across as props for the central government’s self-marketing effort.

The exchange lasted slightly less than 90 minutes and the Prime Minister played moderator and commentator with practised ease. He summed up the takeaways for the wider audience from the narrated examples, and gilded them with statistics, which he read out from an auto cue, about the progress that has been achieved in the past four years.

The examples were edifying. They had a before-and-after aspect to them. The farmers seemed to have crossed into the Promised Land in the past four years, underlying the government’s message that the country was a wasteland of underdevelopment in the previous six-and-a-half decades.

There was not a hint of distress. A farmer from Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh was deftly cut off when he inserted a “but” into his narrative. Rajvinder Singh said he had 15 acres of land and was farming for 20 years. He had also leased an equal amount of land. On finding about three years ago that the water table was dipping, he went to a Krishi Vigyan Kendra for advice and decided to give up rice and wheat cultivation for watermelon and musk melon using a combination of drip irrigation and mulching (to prevent weed growth). His annual income had grown to ₹15-20 lakh. But when he said that his income was not steady because costs kept rising, the Prime Minister cut to another farmer from the state, a (token) Muslim, who, to the immense gratification of the Prime Minister said he had visited “Gujarat Vibrant” (Vibrant Gujarat, an investment mela, was initiated by Modi as Gujarat chief minister) and saw “adverse condition farming,” there. That inspired him to grow sugarcane in trenches interspersed with potato and vegetables.

Rural distress seemed so easily curable. The government had a platter of schemes, the Krishi Vigyan Kendras were ready and willing and farmers had to just take the initiative to vaporise their misery.

This is not to say that the examples were unreal. It is just that the mix of farmers was not representative. Only the successes had been chosen but not those who had tried and struggled.

Amid the propaganda, some success stories

Aside from the propaganda value─and one cannot fault any government for self-promotion─there were some useful messages. Neha Rathoe, a young graduate woman farmer from Madhya Pradesh said her harvest of tomatoes from one hectare or 2.5 acres had increased from 500 quintals to 800 quintals with the use of drip irrigation. Her weeding costs had reduced and she was applying less fertiliser.

There were other inspiring examples supporting integrated farming, fishery, poultry rearing, horticulture and organic farming. Some farmers had also benefitted from crop insurance. Others had seen gains from organising themselves into farmer producer companies.

Some answers were perhaps rehearsed because the person translating from Kannada gave more details than the farmers who did the talking, reminding one of a recent translation gaffe in Singapore involving the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister made a pitch for increased use of drip irrigation. He also urged farmers to shift from cultivation of low-paying cereals to high-value agriculture like dairying, bee keeping, poultry rearing and aquaculture.

The programme presented a sanitised version of reality. The Prime Minister made laudatory references to the network of 550 regulated mandis which have gone online. He did not mention that in the absence of grading and sorting facilities, remote buyers could not be sure of the quality they were offered, and spot inspections were necessary. Inter-mandi trading has not taken off in a big way. There was also resistance from commission agents to making online payments to farmers. With farmers borrowing from commission agents (who double up as moneylenders) they had no option but to sell soon after harvest, when prices are low. Unless they were free to borrow from banks, they would not be free to sell.

The crop insurance scheme was also not working as it should. Technology was not being used to obviate costly and time-consuming crop cutting experiments. Claims were not being settled in time. States were not paying their share of the premiums on time, denying farmers compensation for say, prevented sowing due to late arrival of rains.

A lady from Sholapur said her all-woman farmer producer company was making dal and selling it under its own brand. But that is not the experience of pigeonpea (tur) farmers at large. Prices of pulses are ruling low. The government is unable to dispose of the pulses which it procured last year.

These are real issues. Farmers are producing enough and more but they are not getting remunerative prices. This is why 110 farmers’ organisation jointly went on strike earlier this month. Before that tribal farmers in Maharashtra went on a Long March on foot from Nashik to Mumbai. The television images were moving. But that doesn’t seem to be the picture of rural India the Prime Minster wishes to see.

The author is editor of smartindianagriculture.com

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