New Delhi:

The Congress on Friday called on the Bharatiya Janata Party to respond proactively to protesting farmers’ demands about a legal guarantee for Minimum Support Price, or MSP, and warned the government, “Do not allow the farmers of this country to face a situation like Manipur”.

The opposition party also slammed the government for taking the time out to watch a movie – on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, members of his cabinet, and MPs attended a screening of ‘The Sabarmati Report‘, a movie about the 2002 train-burning incident in Gujarat’s Godhra.

“The Modi government has time to watch movies but does not have time to listen to demands of farmers. Prime Minister Modi should talk to the farmers without delay and immediately pass a law on MSP… this is the demand of the Congress,” party leader Randeep Singh Surjewala said.

“The Congress party is with the farmers,” Mr Surjewala said, also taking the opportunity to throw a jab over the extent of security deployed to stop the farmers and the India-China border crisis

“If the three-layer security which has been put in place for the farmers in Haryana had been put in place on the Chinese border, then China would not have occupied the Indian border,” he said.

The reference to, and warning about, Manipur was stark. Nearly 300 people have been killed since ethnic violence broke out between the Meitei and Kuki communities in Manipur in May 2023.

The Congress and other opposition parties have been fiercely critical of the handling of the crisis by BJP, which is also in power in Manipur, and questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi on this issue.

The BJP has not yet responded to this round of attacks by the Congress.

The Manipur warning came on a day when a group of 101 farmers began a ‘Dilli chalo’ march to press home a list of nearly five-year-old demands, including a legal guarantee for MSP.

READ | 8 Farmers Injured In Tear Gas Shelling, Protest March Over MSP Halted

The march, from Shambhu on the Haryana-Punjab border, began at 1 pm but ran immediately into fortified, multi-layered police barricades across National Highway 44.

In the clashes that followed, police fired tear gas shells to disperse the protesters. Eight people were injured, and two others seriously wounded, according to farmer leader Sarwan Singh Pandher.

Visuals shared by news agency IANS showed chaotic scenes at a police barricade across National Highway 44. In the 73-second video white tear gas smoke enveloped protesting farmers.

Ambala, Haryana: Police fired tear gas shells at the protesters pic.twitter.com/3sCa9haqT5

— IANS (@ians_india) December 6, 2024

As the video pans out, rolls of barbed wire can also be seen and the gassed farmers are seen pulling back. An elderly farmer, affected by the tear gas, is attended to by fellow-protesters.

Beaten back for the day, the farmers said they would not admit defeat but would give the government 24 hours to reach out to them with a proposition to address their concerns.

The farmers – lakhs of whom have been protesting since September 2020, when the Modi government passed three farm law that were severely criticised and later rolled back – also lamented the action taken against them. “Modiji cannot justify the actions against us. We are deeply hurt.”

“If our protest is allowed inside Delhi… I will ask, ‘Why are we treated as enemies?’ Punjabis and Haryanvis saved the country from hunger,” Pandher said.

Shortly before the march began, Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan told Parliament the Narendra Modi government is committed to purchasing farmers’ produce at MSP.

“I want to assure the House… all produce of farmers will be purchased at Minimum Support Price. This is the Modi government and (we will) fulfil Modiji‘s guarantee,” Mr Chouhan said, also taking the opportunity for a dig at the Congress, referring to his “friends from the other side”.

“…they said, on record, they cannot accept the MS Swaminathan Commission recommendations… especially on paying 50 per cent more than cost price,” he said, declaring the government is already buying paddy, wheat, jowar, soyabean at 50 per cent over cost of production from three years ago.

Today’s protest was meant to press home farmers’ longstanding demands for a legal guarantee for Minimum Support Price, waiver of farm loans, and protection from increased electricity tariffs.

NDTV Explains | Centre’s 5-Year MSP Plan, And Why Farmers Are Not Convinced

The demand for legal backing for MSPs – which refers to a priced fixed by the government to protect farmers from a steep fall in crop prices; for example, during a bumper crop when prices plummet – a has been a core ask of protests that began in September 2020.

MSPs, however, have no legal backing, meaning the government is not obliged to buy, for example, 10 per cent of a farmer’s paddy crop at the floor price. And it is this that the farmers want changed.

With input from agencies

NDTV is now available on WhatsApp channels. Click on the link to get all the latest updates from NDTV on your chat.

A potato farm on the outskirts of Varanasi.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The report released by the Finance Ministry and the vote-on-account presented by the Finance Minister are concerned more about portraying a glowing image of the government than about the financing plans for 2024-25. For the same reason, one is constrained to confine the discussion on the Budget to one question: was the distress in agriculture over the past decade alleviated by policy, or has it been exacerbated?

Incomes and profitability

All official data appear to indicate the latter. First, there was a strong downward pull on agricultural prices leading to a squeeze on farmers’ incomes. The sectoral deflator in agriculture and allied sectors — estimated as the difference in the growth rates of gross value added in current and constant prices — declined from 9.4 in 2013-14 to 5.0 in 2019-20 and 3.7 in 2023-24.

Second, the stagnation or fall of agricultural prices in the market was not ameliorated by any rise in minimum support prices (MSP). For major foodgrain crops, the MSPs rose by an average of 8-9% per annum between 2003-04 and 2012-13, but only by about 5% between 2013-14 and 2023-24. The refusal to adequately raise MSPs affected the government’s ability to intervene effectively in the market to control prices — on the farmers’ side as well as on the retail side.

Third, a promise was made that real incomes of farmers would be doubled between 2015 and 2022. But the issue appears to have disappeared from policy and media discourse in recent years. In fact, real incomes of agricultural households from cultivation fell by about 1.4% between 2012-13 and 2018-19. The fall of incomes from cultivation was not only owing to the stagnation or fall of agricultural prices, but also due to a sharp rise in the costs of inputs in agriculture, particularly fertilizers.

Fourth, rural unemployment rose between 2011-12 and 2018-19. For rural men, the rise was from 1.7% to 5.6%. For rural women, the rise was from 1.7% to 3.5%. Rural unemployment rates fell after 2018-19 but their levels remained higher than in 2011-12 in 2022-23: at 2.8% for men and 1.8% for women. More importantly, the fall of rural unemployment was accompanied by a rise in the share of self-employed women among all women workers. And most of this rise in the rural areas was in agriculture. In short, there was a crowding of the agricultural sector by unemployed workers from the non-agricultural sectors at a time when agricultural prices were not rising and agricultural incomes were falling.

Fifth, real wages in rural India have never risen after 2016-17 and have even fallen after 2020-21 – particularly in the context of the crowding of the agricultural labour market. These trends have been true for agricultural wages and non-agricultural wages in the rural areas. All rises in nominal wages were wiped out by inflation.

Finally, public investment in agriculture, in general as well as in specific fields like agricultural research and extension, were stubbornly stagnant, and occasionally even fell, over the past decade. Consequently, capital investment in agricultural and allied sectors did not rise. Most of the long-term bank credit supplied to agriculture was also diverted away as short-term loans to corporates and agri-business firms.

It is thus clear that incomes and profitability in rural India were under severe stress across the two terms of the Union government.

Painting a rosy picture

Yet, the Finance Ministry’s report and the Budget speech attempt to paint a totally different picture. They cherry-pick and cite absolute numbers on the increases in agricultural production. But they ignore the fact that the index numbers of production of all principal crops grew by 3.1% annually between 2003-04 and 2010-11, but only by 2.7% annually between 2011-12 and 2022-23. If we consider the index numbers of yield, the fall was sharper: from 3.3% per year to 1.6% per year. In short, the fortuitous spurt of agricultural growth during the pandemic years was inadequate to reverse the long-term decline of agricultural growth beginning from the early-2010s.

The Budget Estimates for 2024-25 also do not inspire confidence. There is no plan in the Budget to substantively reverse the decline of growth in agriculture — either through welfare measures or through investment measures.

In 2024-25, the most important heads and flagship schemes in agriculture and allied sectors are to face a spending cut. Fertilizer subsidies are to fall from ₹1.9 lakh crore in 2023-24 to ₹1.6 lakh crore in 2024-25. Food subsidies are to fall from ₹2.1 lakh crore in 2023-24 to ₹2 lakh crore in 2024-25. The allocation for the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana is to decline from ₹17,000 crore in 2023-24 to ₹12,000 crore in 2024-25. If ₹90,000 crore was the spending under MGNREGS in 2022-23, the allocation for 2024-25 is only ₹86,000 crore. The transfers under the PM-Kisan scheme remain the same as during its inception in 2019, implying a fall in the real value of cash transfers.

There was much mention in the Budget speech on blue revolution in the fisheries sector, but the budgeted allocation for the sector has been increased by only ₹134 crore. The budgeted allocation for the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying has increased only by ₹193 crore between 2023-24 and 2024-25.

The revival of agricultural growth from its long-term slump requires imaginative policy shifts and decisive fiscal measures. But the interim Budget provides no indications of such a plan or even intent.

R. Ramakumar teaches at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai