People's Democracy

MAHARASHTRA

Neo-Liberal Policies Lead To 
Starvation Deaths, Peasant Suicides

Ashok Dhawale

THE disastrous effects of the neo-liberal policies pursued by the ruling classes for the last decade and a half are now manifesting themselves in the agrarian sector of the country with a vengeance. Drought is the proverbial last straw on the back of the camel. 

The most tragic case of agrarian crisis today is, of course, that of Andhra Pradesh, ruled for nearly a decade by its former CEO and World Bank lackey, Chandrababu Naidu. Well over 3,000 suicides of debt-ridden peasants have taken place in that hapless state, beginning 1997 – the golden jubilee year of Indian independence – and the suicides still continue unabated seven years later in 2004. Other states like Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh, and even Kerala and Punjab, are showing increased incidence of peasant suicides. The Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput area of Orissa, along with tribal areas elsewhere, has long been afflicted by massive malnutrition, leading to hundreds of starvation deaths of tribal children.

The tragedy of Maharashtra today is that it is reeling under both these phenomena at the same time. There have been over 1,000 malnutrition-related deaths of tribal children in the last three months; and over 50 debt-ridden peasants have committed suicide over the same period. Both these events are by no means a new occurrence. Starvation deaths of tribal children were first reported way back in 1993, under the Congress government; and peasant suicides first began in 1998, under the Shiv Sena-BJP regime. The severe drought in Maharashtra this year has aggravated both these phenomena and has compounded the miseries of millions of peasants and agricultural workers.

STARVATION DEATHS

It was in the month of June 2004 that reports started coming in of severe malnutrition and starvation deaths of Adivasi children in as many as 15 districts with large tribal populations that are spread across the northern and eastern borders of Maharashtra. As against over 1,000 child deaths in the last three months, there were reports of over 9,000 such deaths in the state over the last one year. The state government’s health department was forced to admit recently that as many as 4,276 Adivasi children were suffering from Grade III malnutrition and another 728 from Grade IV malnutrition, which is its most severe form. The districts worst affected were Nandurbar, Dhule, Amravati, Chandrapur, Gadchiroli, Thane and Nashik. The situation became so serious that on July 8, the Mumbai High Court itself took cognizance of it and issued several directives to the state government to improve matters and report back to the court within a month. 

As a matter of fact, soon after such child deaths were first reported in the Melghat-Dharni area of Amravati district over a decade ago, the then state government had constituted a committee headed by Dr Abhay Bang who, along with his wife Rani Bang, had been carrying out selfless constructive work in the field of tribal welfare in the extremely backward Gadchiroli district of Vidarbha that borders Andhra Pradesh. This committee had many years ago submitted a report that was metaphorically titled “Kovali Panagal” in Marathi, which means ‘The Dropping Off of Tender Leaves’. On the basis of an extensive survey, the report had estimated that as many as 2,27,000 child deaths from all causes take place in Maharashtra every year. It had then made several comprehensive recommendations to prevent and remedy this dire situation. Needless to say, successive state governments simply allowed the report and its recommendations to gather dust. The present situation is the inevitable result of this criminal negligence.

The reasons for the shocking state of malnutrition in the Adivasi areas are not far to seek. 

Abject poverty, chronic landlessness, forced eviction from forests, ruthless exploitation by the landlord-moneylender-contractor-forester-police-bourgeois politician nexus, illiteracy and lack of educational facilities, unemployment and failure of the employment guarantee scheme, the complete breakdown of the public distribution system, the poor nutritional status of the mother, utterly inadequate health services, lack of proper water supply and sanitation, a practically non-existent communications network, consistent neglect of all-round development of the tribal areas and massive corruption in all government schemes meant for tribal welfare – these are the basic causes of this malady. 

Neo-liberal policies of successive central and state governments, by virtually writing off the vast Adivasi population in the crazy market-oriented drive for profits, have greatly aggravated every single one of the above factors. All this underlines the need for a sharp break from the liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation (LPG) strategy of ‘development’, and also the necessity of a multi-dimensional approach to the alleviation of poverty and malnutrition in the tribal belts. 

PEASANT SUICIDES

In their papers presented at the recent seminar “India – An Economic Agenda for 2004”, Amiya Kumar Bagchi and Utsa Patnaik have clearly pinpointed the link between neo-liberal policies, peasant suicides and agrarian distress. 

Amiya Kumar Bagchi lists the factors responsible for peasant distress as follows, “A drastic decline in public investment in agriculture; a steep increase in prices of inputs caused by the slashing of subsidies on fertilisers and electricity; a steep fall in the prices of cash crops in a situation in which farmers have had to shift to cash crops in a desperate attempt to save their few acres from the moneylender’s clutches; the shutting out of farmers from institutional sources of credit in the neo-liberal bid to improve the profitability of banks without hurting the well-heeled defaulters who patronise the rightist and centre-right politicians; finally, the tragedy of forcing poor farmers to compete with one another without the benefit of social regulation and social protection.” 

Utsa Patnaik, analysing the present agrarian crisis, writes, “One of the main causes of agrarian distress has been the sharp decline in public investment and development spending in rural India, which has contributed to halving of output growth and produced large-scale unemployment…At the same time economic reform policies of cutting input subsidies raised input prices, while the cost of credit also rose for farmers, forced to turn to usurious private moneylenders, as the banks so far giving rural credit were directed to no longer consider farmers and small scale industry as priority sectors for lending…All this was happening moreover, as from 1997-98 onwards there was a prolonged fall in global primary product prices which were allowed to ruin Indian farmers producing cash crops like cotton since government refused to intervene to ensure adequate support prices to the growers. Squeezed between falling output prices and rising input prices, unable to obtain any more private or bank loans, the poor peasants and small peasants have been the first to lose what little land and other assets they had. Suicides owing to indebtedness started as far back as 1998 while the latest available data show a rise in landlessness.”

The revival of peasant suicides in Maharashtra is a cumulative result of precisely the factors analysed above. Most of the suicides have taken place in the cotton belt of Vidarbha, and a few in Marathwada. Both these are backward regions of the state. Cotton growers have been facing a crisis due to the virtual dismantling of the Monopoly Cotton Procurement Scheme by the state government last year, accompanied by the officially sanctioned entry of private traders. In the early part of the cotton season last year, due to a rise in international cotton prices, the peasantry got good prices from the traders. But as the season wore on, the prices plummeted, and the safety net of government procurement had been removed altogether. Like for many other crops, large-scale cotton imports resulting from the lifting of quantitative restrictions and pegging the import duty of cotton to a ridiculously low 10 per cent in the interests of the textile mill magnates, have served to depress domestic cotton prices paid to our own peasantry. 

Apart from the steeply rising cost of agricultural inputs, bogus and spurious seeds, fertilisers and pesticides have also been flooding the market, causing massive losses to the peasantry. The crop insurance scheme has turned out to be a hoax, with the peasants getting no benefit out of it in spite of crop loss. Further, due to the crunch in institutional credit, private moneylenders in Maharashtra often charge usurious interest to the tune of 60 to120 per cent per annum! And the last straw is the failure of the monsoon in Vidarbha and, indeed, in several other parts of Maharashtra this year, leading to severe drought.

SEVERE DROUGHT

Last year, despite a good monsoon in most parts of the country, as many as 71 tehsils in 11 districts of Western Maharashtra and Marathwada were hit by grim drought conditions. This year, rains played truant in the state for a month and a half, from mid-June to end-July, leading to drought of varying severity in large parts of over 25 of the 35 districts. As a result, in more than 50 per cent of the cultivable area, either the first sowing went waste or no sowing operations could be conducted at all. There were considerable areas where even the second sowing proved futile. The plight of the already debt-ridden peasantry and agricultural workers can well be imagined. Although the monsoon has revived somewhat in parts of the state at the end of July, the damage to the kharif crop is considerable, and in several places irreversible. In some tehsils, drought has been persisting now for the fifth year in a row.

Over 2,000 water tankers were pressed into service in July for drinking water purposes. Cattle camps were opened in some of the worst affected districts. Large sums of money were spent on special airplanes to spray the clouds with chemicals to induce artificial rain. Work under the employment guarantee scheme (EGS) was started, although in several places EGS works remained on paper, with no real labourers at work. A leading Marathi daily actually printed a photograph of an official (but bogus) EGS ration coupon that had been issued in the name of Sushil Kumar Shinde, chief minister of Maharashtra!

The current drought, superimposed on the neo-liberal policies of the last decade and on the massive profligacy, corruption and mismanagement of those in control, has also hit by far the most influential agro-industry sector in Maharashtra – that of the co-operative sugar factories. As a result of poor rainfall, falling prices and a particularly virulent pest infection called ‘Lokri Mava’, sugarcane cultivation in the state has almost halved in the last four years. According to a report in The Times of India on July 26, 2004, the area under cane cultivation has dropped from 6,86,000 hectares in 1999-2000 to a little over 3,00,000 hectares today. Consequently, sugar production in the state has also steeply declined from 62.21 lakh tonnes in 2002-03 to 32.01 lakh tonnes in 2003-04, and it is likely to fall further this year. 

This will have a disastrous effect not only on the sugar industry, but also on the three sections of toilers intimately connected with it – the cane-growing peasantry, the cane-cutting agricultural labour and the sugar factory workers – all of whom have been mercilessly exploited by the handful of powerful sugar barons, who share control over the levers of state power along with big business.

NEED FOR MASS MOVEMENT 

The class bias, bankruptcy and corruption of the ruling classes of Maharashtra in dealing with the question of drought and water management becomes crystal clear from just two glaring examples. 

The first is that, after spending over Rs 40,000 crore on irrigation after the formation of Maharashtra state in 1960, successive state governments have managed to increase the proportion of irrigated land in the state from 6 per cent to just 16 per cent in the last 44 years! Hundreds of irrigation projects in the state – major, medium and minor – have remained incomplete for years due to lack of funds, further aggravating regional imbalances and spawning separatist demands. Where did all the above money really go? Why have water harvesting and watershed development with peoples’ involvement been consistently neglected by the powers that be for so many years? 

The second is that, the single crop sugarcane which occupies less than 4 per cent of the total cultivated area in the state, consumes over 70 per cent of the ground and surface water irrigation resources, while all other crops which occupy 96 per cent of the cultivated area are left with just 30 per cent of the irrigation resources! This is one of the main reasons for the general backwardness of agriculture in Maharashtra as a whole. In 100 of the 353 tehsils of Maharashtra that are chronically drought-prone, there exist over 100 sugar factories! That is itself one of the reasons for these tehsils being chronically drought-prone. Who is responsible for such skewed development of the state? 

Space does not permit a discussion in this piece on how the chronic problem of drought in Maharashtra can and should be tackled. Suffice it to say here that several government-appointed commissions dealing with the question of water and irrigation, many other experts on agriculture, and a number of path-breaking field experiments on water harvesting and watershed development, have concretely suggested ways and means to solve the burning problem of chronic drought and to set up a system of scientific and socially equitable water management within a definite time-frame. What is required is a powerful mass movement against vested interests in order to achieve the same.