If hundreds of millions of India's people continue to live in conditions of hunger and poverty, of curable diseases, of illiteracy in the absence of schooling and are subjected to the worst forms of caste, class, and gender oppression, the one reason is the failure to resolve the agrarian crisis, economist V.K. Ramachandran said on Wednesday.
Listing out seven conditions, which he said would need to be addressed for the agrarian question to be resolved, Mr. Ramachandran of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, said the distinguishing feature of the Indian state was that there was no permanent policy regime in place to deal any one of the issues.
“There are people who stake their political career on selling out to Wal-Mart. There are people who stake their political career on polishing the shoes of George Bush. But they cannot spend a single day tackling any one of these issues. This kind of inequality and injustice exists because of the failure to resolve the agrarian crisis,” he said, delivering the V.P. Chintan Memorial Lecture organised by Indian School of Social Sciences.
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Mr. Ramachandran, who talked on ‘Resolving the agrarian question in India', said that in India any understanding of the agrarian question required to go beyond the strict categories of socio-economic class, caste, gender and other forms of group exclusion and repression.
The first issue he highlighted was the need to free the countryside of all forms of landlordism, old and new, arguing that landlord households owned most of the land and, generally, they did not participate in major agricultural operations.
“But they dominate not only economic but modern social and political hierarchy in the village,” he said.
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The second issue was to free the working peasantry and manual workers from their fetters of unfreedom and drudgery and to guarantee them means of income and livelihood.
The third, Mr. Ramachandran, said was to distribute agricultural land. “The popular perception is that land concentration has broken up. But statistics show there is concentration. In 2006 only 4.8 million acres of land was distributed and West Bengal accounts for 20 per cent,” he explained.
Mr. Ramachandran said the fourth issue was to provide the rural working people with home sites and basic, clean, sanitary homes and habitations. The fifth issue was to create the condition for the liberation of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, of women and other victims of sectional deprivation, including the rural Muslim population. “The question of landlordism is very important here, because it stands at the apex not only of the economic system, but also the apex of the system of caste hierarchy.”
The sixth issue was to ensure universal formal school education and the last was to achieve general democratisation of life and progressive cultural development in rural India.
To a question from N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu , who wanted his opinion on the argument that FDI in retail trade would be of huge help to agriculture, that living standards would thrive because of it and that employment would be generated and infrastructure created, Mr. Ramachandran said that historically, there was evidence of de-propertisation of the peasantry, because what was being practised was not cooperative farming, but contract farming.
“There is no guarantee for buying because they could always say that the production fails to match our standards. As a result, many people lose their income and their property.” He said that after a very long time India had established food sovereignty in terms of production and it was the basis for national sovereignty.
He said the crop pattern and land use would be dictated by the demands of the supermarket, and not by India's need to be food sufficient.