The Statesman published an article on the agrarian crisis in India by AID Boston volunteer Somnath Mukherji. The full text of the article is reproduced below. 

While rural representatives get a berth in legislatures, connectivity with the grassroots in terms of problem management is lost in the din, writes SOMNATH MUKHERJI

The chronic, agrarian distress in a string of states from Andhra Pradesh to Kerala, Maharashtra to Punjab has exposed our failure to comprehend the root causes of the problem and address it.

The inter-human relationship and the human-to-nature relationship that has evolved in India is not easily grasped in its entirety by a westernised epistemological system that the elite has come to accept.
Rural life in India is still based on such relationships, many aspects and nuances of which continue to elude policy makers, academia and the urban elite in general. An effort to rediscover our own epistemology should stem, at the least, from the pragmatic need to find more humane and sustainable ways of living, not just for rural India, but also for the rest of the world.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm has in his The Age of Empire, cited how minorities of potential movers and shakers acquired the ways of their imperial masters, adopting their peculiar ideas of time, place and domestic arrangement. Sixty years after Independence, Indian policy makers remain captives of the same colonial mindset.

In a historical time frame, the abrupt transformation of agricultural occupation to a controlled economic enterprise has shaken its social, cultural and spiritual moorings. The essence of the accompanying teething trouble has not been grasped on our non-indigenous knowledge frame.

Whatever little has been understood has been in the retrospect and after substantial damage has been caused. Words and concepts fall short of conveying the delicate and complex mix of individualism and collectivism at work in rural Indian societies, which are neither “collectives” nor mere aggregations of individual production units. It baffles scholars why it is so difficult to organise the peasants effectively, even in the face of their ruinous economic and occupational hardships.

Socially, culturally and contextually, insensitive technical solutions destroy or weaken feedback and coping mechanisms in societies. While the Green Revolution was a response to the goal of attaining food sovereignty, it left the Indian agrarian communities with a range of inscrutable problems that had no indigenous solutions.

Farmers in Punjab could not rely on their traditional feedback mechanisms to understand that the indiscriminate use of pesticides was turning their body cells cancerous, causing infertility in adults and mental disorders in children. Along with pests, pesticides kill bees and butterflies that are responsible for pollination. The resultant, unfathomable and irreversible destruction wrought upon the web of life remained incomprehensible to the farmer.

The only means of establishing the causal relationship was through retrospective empirical studies. The Centre for Science and Environment, a Delhi-based NGO, analysed 20 blood samples from four villages of Punjab for 14 organochlorines and 14 organophosphorous pesticides. The study published in March, last year documents the presence of 15 of the 28 pesticides in all the blood samples. Many of the chemicals present are known to cause dermal, neural, immunological, reproductive and genetic defects, besides cancer.

A non-indigenous, epistemological system will continue to objectify and specimenise the society in question. The overly classified knowledge system has yielded us with vivid details but has obscured the glorious whole from our view. It has left us with a reduced appreciation of the interconnectedness of the world. There is a need to rediscover our epistemology that emphasises this interconnectedness and context rather than on isolated phenomena. Aggressive free market capitalism seeks to commodify things hitherto sustained by social or natural mechanisms ~ rendering unfree things that were once free which in effect frees up space for the market.

This has led to the formerly self-sufficient farmers’ ever increasing dependence on external agencies for seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and water. Further, it has rendered the food production for one’s own consumption inefficient and unviable. Hence, foodstuff produced by a farmer or fish caught by a fisherman commands a greater value in the market than it does by satisfying the hunger of a family member.

Hunger is commodified and can be satisfied either through exchange of monetary instruments or through national and international aid. KC Suri has shown (Economic and Political Weekly dated 22 April) how farmers who were traditionally food providers have been reduced to beneficiaries of free ration. It is a paradox of our times that when a vast majority in a developing country controls the food production, the agrarian population collectively exercises little political power that represents their interests. When a few individuals control large portions of the food production, they start to wield disproportionately large power. While only one per cent of the population in the USA is engaged in agriculture, the agricultural lobby exercises great influence in Washington, whereas over 60 per cent of the population in India can only hope for some State munificence or gather trickled-down benefits.

Rural representation has gone up in the Indian Parliament but it has not been accompanied by a commensurate representation and execution of their actual interests. Ashutosh Varshney (Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India) has cited two main reasons for this anomaly:
1) Well represented in legislatures, rural interests driving the executive institutions are not strong enough and
2) Rural interests are somewhat self-limiting due to the cross currents of caste, religion and ethnicity. The relatively homogenised urban interests are pitted against fractured and heterogeneous rural interests. Both Suri and Varshney have also underscored that depeasantisation of rural political representatives generate other vested interests among the leaders, which are anything but agriculture and hence they cease to represent small and petty agrarian interests. Pauperisation of the countryside is a necessary pre-condition and a direct outcome of modernisation.

Parallel to liberalising the economy and carrying out “structural adjustments”, the government strengthens its welfare functions to guard against destitution and dissent. The Employment guarantee scheme, mid-day meal scheme, relief packages to families left behind by farmers who have committed suicide are manifestations of such welfare functions that underscore the magnanimity of the State.

A pluralist democracy overlaid on a pre-capitalist, paternalistic feudal social system is akin to a pyramid trying to balance itself on a sphere in the expectation that the malleable sphere will eventually flatten out and morph into its base. The thought of the pyramidal top moulding itself to the base is rarely entertained. As electoral politics has become an expensive affair, the economic strength needed to contest an election precludes the participation of the vast majority. Franchise has given the countryside just enough distributed power, which can at best force policy makers to look at the grassroots realities and at worst can marginally ease the pain of devastating top-down policies. This is not enough to ensure long-term empowerment and well being of the masses.

[The author is an electrical engineer in Boston and a volunteer with the Association for India’s Development (www.aidindia.org)]