-Ajay Bhardwaj
The food basket of Bharat, that Punjab was known to be not very long ago, is crumbling. After providing food security to the country veritably for more than four decades, farmers in Punjab find their spine shattered. Instead of bringing joy and prosperity to them, the green revolution has brought them to the throes of interminable indebtness, numberless suicides, reckless devastation of the farm ecology, and epidemic incidence of cancer.
The painfully bleak state of farming in Punjab is reflected in the fact that the growth rate of agriculture has been fluctuating between zero per cent to two per cent annually in the last almost a decade. Landholdings of marginal and small farmers are reduced to one acre to five acres. The vicious cycle of wheat-paddy has sapped the soil of all its nutrition and vitality. Farmers are barely able to make two ends meet.
Significantly, the political leadership and the administration have failed miserably to give paradigm shift to agriculture that, perhaps, reached its saturation decades ago in terms of productivity per hectare. Consequently, the state’s share in the national foodgrain stocks has been dwindling even as Punjab is steadily losing its cherished status of being the foodbowl of the nation. Many other states like Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Assam are coming to the forefront in foodgrains production.
In the land of five rivers, the farmer has always enjoyed a special status. He is a hero in local folk songs and legends. No image of Punjab is complete without a rugged man standing in his green field. So, when farmers begin to kill themselves, even as their crops fail and they are trapped in debt, Punjab”s poster image goes for a six. It is the beleaguered farmer heavily under debt always toying with the idea of suicide that has become the face of the state now.
According to Punjab Finance Minister Manpreet Badal, the overwhelming burden of debt on farmers has touched whopping Rs 90,000 crores. While there is no official confirmation of figures of farmers having committed suicide, a conservative estimate has put it at around 6,000 since 2000.
Instead of addressing the core issue of redressing the plight of farmers to prevent them from committing suicide, the Punjab government in 2009 decided to pay Rs 2 lakh to the families of farmers who committed suicide in the last one year. Though the government doesn”t think there is anything wrong with this bizarre decision, the move triggered a debate as many people wondered if this was the only way to help farmers reeling under debt?
The state government has so far disbursed Rs 2.5 crores under the head. One of the alarming off-shoot of the farming crisis has been that every year thousands of farmers quit farming. Either due to indebtness or finding agriculture unviable to meet both ends meet.
While the agriculture has been stagnating in the state, a serious fall-out of it has been serious ecological imbalance caused in Punjab. The depletion of underground water touched alarming levels, excessive use of fertilizers and insecticides in due course has taken a serious toll on the health of farmers. The way farmers have been dying due to cancer in the Malwa belt is alarming. More than 15,000 farmers have died of cancer or have been suffering of it.
Almost at a time when the Green Revolution was being scripted for the state the legendary agriculturalist Prof. MS Swaminathan, in his prophetic words had sounded a well-timed
warning.
“Intensive cultivation of land without conservation of soil fertility and soil structure would lead ultimately to the springing up of deserts. Irrigation without arrangements for drainage would result in soils getting alkaline or saline. Indiscriminate use of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides could cause adverse changes in biological balance as well as lead to an increase in the incidence of cancer and other diseases, through the toxic residues present in the grains or other edible parts. Unscientific tapping of underground water would lead to the rapid exhaustion of this wonderful capital resource left to us through ages of natural farming. The rapid replacement of numerous locally adapted varieties with one or two high yielding strains in large contiguous areas would result in the spread of serious diseases capable of wiping out entire crops, as happened during the Irish Potato Famine of 1845. Therefore, the initiation of exploitative agriculture without a proper understanding of the various consequences of every one of the changes introduced into traditional agriculture and without first building up a proper scientific and training base to sustain it, may only lead us into an era of agricultural disaster in the long run, rather than to an era of agricultural prosperity.”
Unfortunately, both scientists and farmers did not take the above warning seriously, since they were experiencing the joy of high yields and income. n
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