Volume 2, No. 6-7, June-July 2001

The tales of agony and death go on and on. Death by malnutrition, disease and suicide has become a common occurrence throughout Rajasthan. Ironically the most wealthy Marwari community in the country is witness to their home state turning into a morgue. They could not care, they continue to mint money in all corners of India. Nor is the Congress(I) state government or the Central Government really bothered. Those dying are, afterall, the poorest, a large section being tribals.

Rajasthan may be the worst affected, but other states have also been badly hit. Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and even Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal are facing drought. Thousands of people and cattle are perishing. In all these states the most affected are the tribals. Here, people have been reduced to a state of inhuman existence. The dead do not live to see the torment and agony of the living. An entire generation of children are growing up under conditions of extreme malnutrition, distorting both their physical and mental development.

In Rajasthan the drought has affected 35 million people and 54 million cattle in 31 districts (out of 32) of the state. This year 30,585 villages are affected compared to 23,400 last year. This year even ‘godra’ (a chapati made from a grass and eaten by tribals, during acute shortages) is not available.

In Maharashtra the government has declared 26 districts (out of 35) as scarcity-hit. It is the worst drought since 1992. In the tribal belt of Nasik division (Nandurbar, Jalgao, Dhule, Ahmednagar and Nasik districts) 8000 children upto the age of six, have died of malnutrition during the entire year. Yet Nasik is not the worst hit. That is Amaravati district. Here, since the last decade, even in normal years hundreds of tribal children have been dying of malnutrition in the Melghat region. What the situation is there this year can well be imagined.

In A.P. the government has declared 142 mandals of 8 districts as drought-affected. Drinking water shortage is, infact, being reported from all districts of AP, but the situation is worst in Anantapur, Kurnool, Prakasham, Karimnagar, Nalgonda and Medak.

In Chhttisgarh about 20 to 25 lakhs have migrated this season in search of food.

And everywhere it is the same story of criminal neglect, willful destruction and high-level corruption. Amidst this misery doctors charge Rs.100 to Rs.300 for mere examination, medicine is extra. Officials pay Rs. 30 to Rs. 35 at ‘relief sites’ when the minimum wage rate is Rs. 60; fictitious names are added to their lists, while hundreds are turned away. Moneylenders (mostly shop keepers) and pawnbrokers are making a killing, with most villagers seeped in debts varying from Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 40,000. Many stand to lose their land, unable to pay the huge interest charges.

But the misery caused to millions of rural people is not just a result of drought, neglect and corruption. It is part of conscious policy where market fanaticism considers only a person with purchasing power to be useful to it; the rest are considered as a burden on the system, and better dispensed with. It is this thinking that results in the ridiculous state of affair where the country has gigantic stocks of foodgrains, while a the same time millions go hungry and thousands die of starvation. Let us look at the absurdity of the situation.

In the famines during the British Raj lakhs died... there was no food. In the droughts of the present Raj, thousands die, while there are millions of tonnes of food. The present Raj is turning out to be as cruel, if not more, than that of the British !! Imagine, in many places of Rajasthan like Nokha, Bikaneer district, mountains of foodgrain stand in full view of the drought-affected people.

India has a huge stock of 45 million tonnes of foodgrains in FCI (Food Corporation of India) godowns. 30% of this is 2 to 4 years old, and beginning to rot. Last year the FCI had to put one million tonnes of stock on the damaged list. An additional 8 million tonnes of wheat have been purchased in the current rabi season. There is no place for storage; rats are feeding on these grain resulting in huge losses; storage charges have skyrocketed. Yet, the government is unwilling to release grain for the starving millions. This is nothing short of criminal massacre.

Not only does the government not release the grains for food-for-work schemes; it refuses neither to waive the BPL criteria nor to reduce the BPL (below poverty line) rate for grains which have been pushed up outside people’s reach. And even where such ration shops exist, invariably limited stocks are available. So far the amounts released by the central government for its various schemes have been nominal. It is more geared to propagating that it is doing something, rather than actually feeding the hungry. Let us look at the situation in the worst affected state of Rajasthan.

Here, the government has put a ceiling of 5 lakhs to be employed (till April 2001) on relief works when 350 lakhs are affected by the drought. Local residents talk with nostalgia about earlier droughts, when employment generation were much higher. Infact, during the 1988 drought in the Jan-May period 17 lakh people had got work in relief sites. This year the figure is only 6 lakhs. But, this year draconian ceilings have been imposed, even though a far greater stock of foodgrains are available, than in the earlier years, for food-for-work schemes. So, for example, in Udaipur district 70,000 were affected but, on an average only 800 got work. Dewla village has 5,000 people, but only 40 got work at the ‘relief site’.

In addition people complained that even the rationed grains were never fully available at the fair-price shops. Anyhow, while the BPL rate for wheat was Rs. 4.6 per kg, maize was available in the open market for Rs. 5 per kg.

So, for all the government’s propaganda, the ground realities show quite a different picture. Stocks rot, while people die of hunger.

But the criminality of the government policy does not end here. It has reached extremes, that would be unthinkable, except in openly despotic regimes. While it has refused to reduce BPL rates for grains even in the face of starvation and death, it has undertake huge exports of wheat through traders below the BPL rate. Over the last few months it has exported 17 lakh tonnes of wheat (and contracted for an additional 9 lakh tonnes) at a price of Rs. 3.9 per kg to traders ($84 per tonne) which is 70 paise below the BPL rate. In fact, between November 2000 and March 2001, the government spent Rs. 664 crores on export subsidy to foodgrains compared to Rs. 498 crores on grains meant for BPL people. So, for all the media hype of cutting food subsidies, the government is willing to give fat subsidies for exports to earn foreign exchange, but is unwilling to spare a paisa in subsidy for the poor and starving masses.

Such blatant anti-people policies would be unthinkable in any even partially democratic system. But with the arrogance of a ruthless power backed by a fascist state machinery, and an as yet dormant masses, it tramples over people’s lives without a care.

But that is soon changing. Throughout Rajasthan there were protests and demonstrations at government godowns. In one demonstration where thousands gathered outside an FCI godown guarded, by hundreds of police, one young protestor was heard saying "yes, let us take the government godowns"; another added "and let us take those of the seths and sahucars (moneylenders) at the same time." Even, an honorary professor of the Delhi school of Economics, Jean Dreze, wrote in the Hindu : "At the sight of such injustice, one finds oneself wishing that the hungry masses would take the right to food into their own hands."

Unfortunately the youth of Rajasthan and Dreze are, as yet, unaware that in earlier famines it was the CPI(ML)[PW] that organised famine raids on FCI godowns and on stocks with the hoarders and moneylenders, to alleviate the suffering of the masses in various parts of central India.

That ofcourse, is the immediate answer to people’s suffering. But the roots lie much deeper. There were worse droughts earlier, but we did not see the level of distress as seen today. The fact is that consistent neglect of the rural sector during these years of economic reforms have pushed the already poverty-stricken rural masses to a state of collapse, making them extremely vulnerable to even small fluctuations in production. Already in a state of sub-human existence, a small shortfall in rain creates a disaster. Drought sharpens water, food and other shortages. But it is not the basis of the kind of distress we are seeing. What you see today is a policy-driven distress.

If India’s 200 million tonne harvest was divided on a basis of minimum caloric requirement, the huge foodgrain surplus would vanish. The government and media try and make out that it is a flourishing agriculture that is resulting in the ever-growing stocks. This is a lie. Foodgrain production growth is dropping, yet stocks are increasing. The reason is that a surplus is being generated by a big fall in the purchasing power of the poor. This has been aggravated ten-fold by the defacto, dismantling of the PDS system (offtake by the rural poor in just the last year declined by 23%). India’s ‘surplus’ foodgrains is based on sending hundreds of millions of people hungry to bed every single night.

The present distress in rural India is a disaster of a permanent nature which will hit the rural masses with increasing intensity each year, driving thousands to their death. The droughts only add to the acute suffering. The droughts themselves are the result of years of faulty planning and anarchic development resulting in widespread environmental degradation. This too, is of a permanent nature.

Let us then look at the state of the agrarian economy in these years of economic reforms that has so devastated the lives of millions of people.

In the past decade we find a drastic fall in the growth rate of agricultural production, productivity, investment in agriculture, rural employment, etc. It is all these factors that have led to the horrifying conditions in rural India.

The growth rate of crop production has almost halved in the 1990s compared to the 1980s. It has dropped from 3.4% in the 1980s to 1.8% today. It continues to drop even further. The following chart gives a picture of the falling growth rate of agricultural production in the various categories.

In oilseeds and pulses there has infact been an absolute drop in production. Oilseed production has dropped from 25 million tonnes (mt) in 1996/97 to 19 mt in 2000-01; while pulses has fallen from 14 m.t to 13 m.t in the same period.

If we turn to foodgrain productivity we find that the growth rate has dropped from 3.2% annually in the 1980s to 2.3% annually in the 1990s. While foodgrain yields increased from 11.4 quintal (1140 kg) per hectare in 80/81 to 15.7 quintal per hectare in 1990/91; it rose to just 17.7 quintal in 1997/98. (Source : India 2000; GOI publication)

Therefore it is not surprising that the per capita availability of foodgrains has been declining from 510 gms per day in 1991 to 466 grams per day in the year 2000. But this does not throw light on the real picture of consumption per day, which will be far less. The ‘availability’ includes the huge stocks in the godowns which are not really ‘available’ to the masses as they do not have the money to buy it.

Next, investment in agriculture today is nearly half of what it was in the 1980s. The following chart gives a picture of the declining trend in investment in Indian agriculture by both the government and private sources :

Public capital outlays — in irrigation, agricultural research, land development, etc — has fallen as the centre and states claim they do not have the funds. While they are able to find endless resources to assist setting up the infrastructure for the telecom industry, they find nothing for agriculture.

So, for example, in Rajasthan development expenditure on agriculture declined 20% between 1995/96 and 1997/98. Neglecting development, the ruler’s obsession with elitist schemes was reflected in the quixotic decisions of the Ghelot government this year to build golf courses in each district, as part of its ‘relief work’. Last year it decided to build air strips in each district ! Instead of using relief work for water storage schemes, it plans golf courses which consume water equivalent to a village of 9000.

Also, last year the Maharashtra government abandoned 2,600 schemes for water projects due to "inadequate funds". Yet the government can spend Rs. 100 crores each year to supply water by tankers. This satisfies the powerful tanker lobby, which has links with the top politicians of the state. Besides, only 15% of the cultivable land in Maharashtra is under irrigation, which is half the national average, the bulk of which is cornered by the sugar lobby. So, a state which generates one of the largest revenues (due to industrial/finance concentration in the Mumbai-Pune belt) cannot find any funds for irrigation !!

Regarding private investments, farmers have not been able to invest more, because credit investment — not to mention working capital — has dried up. Organised rural credit was in a state of collapse in the 1990s. This got intensified by : (i) the trend towards privatisation of banking and the government’s instructions to public sector banks to end special loans to the primary sector (ii) the crisis in agriculture, due to falling returns.

Finally, if we turn to rural employment, the 1990s witnessed the lowest rate of growth rate in post-1947 history. Rural non-farm employment almost doubled between 1977 to 1989. It has declined since then. In the last seven years of the 1990s it was a mere 0.7%.

Besides, schemes like aqua farming are reducing employment potential, as in the AP coastal belt. Paddy cultivation on one acre provides 150 work days a year; aqua farms a mere 40-50 work days.

In addition the real wages of agricultural labourers have been virtually stagnant during the 1990s.

Who then should the masses turn to for succour ? None of the parliamentary parties, including the revisionists, have any real answers to these problems. At best they may tinker with some reforms to stave off a revolt. Do the NGOs have an answer ? There are hundreds of NGOs working in such areas with very little impact. Except for the few individuals they employ in the villages, the benefits are minimal. Udaipur district of Rajasthan, for example, has 300 well-funded NGOs. Their impact on the ground is negligible.

The answers, both immediate and long-term, have infact been given only by the CPI(ML)[PW] in dealing with such a situation. This can be clearly seen from the fact that while tribals in all parts of the country are being ruthlessly devastated by the present economic policies, those in the areas of the PW’s influence are slowly improving their lot. Today thousands of tribals face hunger, malnutrition, disease and death in vast forest tracts of the country. But, not in Bastar, Adilabad, Rayalaseema, Gadchiroli etc., where the PW is active.

In the immediate sense, the PW has showed how to overcome famine and drought — in Bastar in 1997, in Rayalaseema last year. There, famine raids were organised on government godowns and on hoarders; funds and grains were collected from the rich, and various schemes were organised to cushion the impact of the drought.

In the long-term, as in Bastar and other regions, with the loot by government officials and gentry having ended, with the fleecing by the moneylender, shop-keeper, doctor and others stopped; with health care introduced within the village itself, and with rudimentary forms of cooperative agriculture beginning ... the tribals sustaining power has increased beyond recognition. Though they still live in poverty, there is no decline in their standard of living, in fact there is a gradual improvement.

So, today, with this foundation, they are not as vulnerable as their counterparts elsewhere. Also, with the PW having organised and developed ecologically sustainable water schemes, the areas are not so easily prone to drought. So, while Chhattisgarh has been hit by drought this year its impact is less in the Bastar region. Here, over 100 water tanks have been built, forest protection is maintained by the PW Party and people, and cooperative effort is put in to face any calamity. So while there have been massive migrations from other regions of Chhattisgarh, it has been minimal from here.

Though what has been achieved by the PW is only a start, it shows the way forward for the rural population of India. It shows the way, not only on how to face droughts and famines, but how to minimise their frequency. It shows that there is no inevitability that the situation must deteriorate. It shows a path to the future — the path of agrarian revolution.

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