Tractors for sale

Farmers and farm labourers are in distress even in Punjab and Haryana, success stories' of the Green Revolution.

in Bhatinda & JIND

TRACTORS of all makes, old and new, are lined up as far as the eye can see on the fields at Talwandi Sabo, an important tehsil in Bhatinda district of Punjab. On the highway cutting through the fields there are more of them, and drivers have a hard time trying to find parking space. In all, there are nearly 5,000 tractors. Stationed among the heavy farming vehicles are commission agents in different groups. To an outsider, it is the perfect image of the Green Revolution that brought glory to Punjab in the 1960s and 1970s. It could easily pass off as a farm fair or a promotional programme on mechanised farming by the government. But the reality is biting.

Every Wednesday, Talwandi Sabo hosts the largest second-hand tractor market in the State. Most of the sellers are small and marginal farmers who are in huge debt, thanks to the oppressive inflation and unsupportive government policies in agriculture. The tractor mandi, as it is locally called, is a case study of the dying farming culture of Punjab.

Gurvinder Singh, a small farmer who once owned four acres (one acre is 0.4 hectare) of land, bought a tractor two years ago. He could not afford the rising cost of diesel over the years and has now brought it for distress sale. Successive governments in Punjab have done hardly anything to provide us adequate electricity. We have to use diesel for almost everything tractors, submersible motors, and harvesting equipment. In the last two years, prices of all supplies have increased so much that I had to sell an acre of land. Now I cultivate only an acre and have given the other two acres on contract to a big farmer. I desperately wish that my tractor is sold today, he says.

Intriguingly, Tejwinder Singh is at the mandi to sell his one-day-old tractor! He finds it hard to give his family two square meals a day with the two acres of land he owns. He bought the tractor on an agricultural loan. His logic is strange: I have no money to marry off my daughter. I am in huge debt to private financiers. So I decided to buy a tractor on loan and then come to the mandi the next day to sell it and get some cash.

While he has to pay the bank in instalments, he will get a lump sum at the mandi to marry off his daughter and even to survive for a few months. What, however, he does not realise is that he is falling into a spiral of debt. The new tractor cost him Rs.5 lakh plus 9 per cent interest. He plans to sell it off at Rs.3.5 lakh, the mandi rate. For Tejwinder, that is the only alternative.

The tractor mandi, which began in 1989, picked up business only in the mid-1990s, says Gurcharan Singh, the pradhan, or president, of the mandi. In the last two years, the number of tractors coming here has increased. Earlier it was not more than 1,000; these days it is nothing fewer than 5,000 a day, he says. The agents who help the farmers sell the tractors too are one-time farmers who left their unprofitable vocation.

Gurcharan says the number of buyers, too, has fallen. There are some farmers who come here to sell their high-capacity tractors and buy smaller ones. This suggests that a small farmer's capacity is decreasing. The only ones who can afford the rising cost of agriculture are big farmers with more than 50 acres of land because they saved a lot of money in the heyday of the Green Revolution. In addition, these farmers have other businesses that help them afford better lifestyles, he says.

The big farmers, however, are a minuscule minority in Punjab, which has a poor record of land reforms. Sukhpal Singh, a senior economist at Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana, noted that out of 10 lakh farmer families in the State, only 9,000 had more than 50 acres of land. As many as 11,000 families owned between 25 and 50 acres, while the rest had less than 12.5 acres. The bulk of them owned less than four acres.

Marginal farmers

The situation is no different in the Malwa region, which comprises most of southern and central Punjab and is the heart of the Green Revolution. In Tamkot village, all farmers except one or two have less than five acres each of land. Of them, 80 per cent have abandoned farming.

Nirmal Singh and his wife, Sukhwinder Kaur, once owned 2.5 acres of land. But the rising input costs put the couple in deep debt, and all they have now is 0.6 acre.

Nirmal has already sold his tractor. Modan Singh, Nirmal's neighbour, is left with 0.25 acre of the six acres he had. Both the families are in debt. Between them, they owe at least Rs.20,000 to the local grocers. To cut costs, both have stopped using spices in their food. To top it all, both have surreptitiously started going to the morning labour markets in nearby Mansa town in search of work. That is the worst that can happen to a farmer in Punjab. But even this does not help: work is not available for more than 10 days in a month.

Haryana's woes

The case of Haryana, another great beneficiary of the Green Revolution, is similar. Most of the small farmers are Ahirs or poor Jats. They have been suffering because of the rising production cost in agriculture. What differentiates Haryana, Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh from the rest of the country's agrarian belts is their dependence on mechanised farming, thanks to the Green Revolution. Elsewhere in the country it is subsistence farming.

With economic liberalisation, the government gradually started withdrawing the benefits that it once gave these farmers. The same mechanised high-productivity farming, the use of pesticides and fertilizers, and modern irrigation rather than rain-fed agriculture now became a burden to them. The farmers were left high and dry as the markets opened up and the prices of crops did not rise as expected. Since April 1, the Union government has decontrolled the prices of all fertilizers except urea. At a grain market in Jind, Haryana, trader Suresh Kumar showed Frontline a price list. In 2007, a 50-kg packet of urea cost less than Rs.150; it now sells for Rs.265. The prices of DAP, or diammonium phosphate (which also comes in 50-kg packets), and zinc (10-kg packets) have gone up by almost 200 per cent in the last five years. Seed prices have increased by more than 120 per cent.

In order to cultivate one acre of land, a farmer needs at least 10 packets of different fertilizers, says Suresh Kumar. Diesel prices have gone up from Rs.22 to Rs.38 in the last two years. All this means that a farmer has to spend double the amount of what he had to spend three years ago for an acre of land.

Mostly, paddy, wheat and cotton are cultivated in these areas. Last year, cotton prices plummeted to an all-time low. Small farmers also lease out land from big farmers. Five years ago, the lease was Rs.5,000 to Rs.6,000 an acre, but these days the rates have shot up to Rs.40,000, Suresh Kumar says. Last year's drought brought more misery to the farmers.

Rajvinder Singh Rana, State secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist Liberation), makes specific observations about the change the price rise has caused in Haryana and Punjab. Once farmers had a good number of domesticated animals, but now many are being sold off. In the past few years farmers have begun to sell all their milk. In short, the food basket of Punjab is diminishing.

He also points to the vicious cycle of debt that the farmers are in. The lack of adequate institutional financing drives many small farmers to grain commission agents who lend money to them at more than 25 per cent interest, he says. There is also a reverse pattern in leasing out land, he says. Earlier big farmers used to rent out their land at very high rates. But these days, lack of capital and huge debts are forcing small farmers to rent out whatever little land they have to big farmers at half or less than half the market price. The rich farmers are thus getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

According to Rana, the growing inequalities have also led to a higher crime rate than earlier in the States. In Punjab, many people are getting addicted to cheap narcotic drugs because of distress, he says.

Rana says the commission agents dictate terms to the farmers now. Marginal farmers get money from these agents, but their profits are so low that they are unable to pay the agents back. In order to survive, the farmers pay back the agents in instalments at higher rates of interest and get into an unofficial contract where the agents ask the farmers to buy ration, groceries and clothes from shops where they have fixed commissions. The price here is higher than the market price. This is a vicious circle of debt which the farmers cannot escape. Such forms of bondage can be seen across Punjab and Haryana, says Rana.

Pushed to the wall, many of them are ready to work as causal labourers. In one of his studies, Sukhpal Singh of PAU writes about farmers joining the unskilled labour force: The process of de-peasantisation in Punjab began since the early 1990s and gathered momentum since 2000. More than two lakh small/marginal farmers have left farming due to economic distress. An extensive field survey showed that 22 per cent joined the labour market, 23 per cent joined the low-paid private/government jobs and 27 per cent started some low-skill self-employed venture. There are no strategies to assist them. Those who sold land in distress to repay old debts were not better off. Ten per cent were living on meagre land rent as distress-rentiers' and are more prone to drug addiction. Those who left since long have again become worse off.

Agricultural labourers

If that is the worst that can happen to a farmer, the condition of agricultural labourers is beyond words. Traditionally, Jat Sikhs in Punjab and Jats in Haryana have owned the bulk of the cultivable land, and Dalits have worked in their fields. But the mounting pressure on farmers to cut costs has resulted in the exploitation of agricultural workers. Most of these workers stay in separate colonies in a village (mostly on the western underdeveloped side of the village) in temporary shacks with bare minimum essentials to survive. The landlords often pay them a pittance.

Frontline visited two such villages in the Malwa region in Punjab Khiala and Tamkot in Mansa district and one in Haryana, Utla in Jind district. In the past five years, both States have seen a huge influx of agricultural workers from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, where survival has been even more difficult. This has led to a bitter conflict between local agricultural labourers and the migrant workers. Migrant workers who are ready to work 24 hours, guard the fields and work for low wages out of sheer necessity have become the favourites of landlords.

Last year, at Khiala village, local agricultural workers led a movement demanding minimum wages from the landlords and proper housing from the government (Promised land, Frontline, July 17, 2009). They were arrested and the Jat Sikh landlords boycotted them for several days. Darshan Singh, an agricultural worker at Tamkot, stays in a 10 x12 feet house, which has no electricity. I can offer you tea but without sugar or milk, he says, adding that he has stopped buying these items. He lost his arm in an accident while working in the field six years ago. His wife, Sarjeet Kaur, is now the breadwinner of the family with two children. But work is not there for more than 10 days in a month.

Sarjeet Kaur says they have stopped eating dal. Instead, they eat only rotis and achar (pickle). Some farmers have given me their goats and buffaloes to take care of. They have promised to give me half the amount when they sell them, she says.

In the run-up to the last parliamentary elections, the Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) government in Punjab fixed an electricity meter at Darshan's house to lure him to vote for the party. (The party is run mostly by Jat Sikhs.) Three months later, the family got an electricity bill for Rs.25,000, for running one bulb and a fan. When Darshan could not pay, the electricity connection was cut.

This is the story of many agricultural workers in Khiala and Tamkot and many other villages of Punjab and Haryana.

It is 24x7 work for almost eight months of the farming season for Md. Azeem and 15 of his friends who migrated to Utla village in Jind district from Purnea in Bihar. He says he earns up to Rs.12,000, but his cost of living has increased so much that he can send only slightly more than Rs.5,000 to feed five mouths back home. He has no other choice as floods in the Kosi river have destroyed his fields in his native place.

The only respite for the local agricultural workers is the MGNREGS [Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme] which gets them work, but even that is not for more than 50 days a year, says Bhagwant Samaon of the Mazdoor Mukti Morcha.

The rest of the days, the workers have to find work at labour markets, but there, too, the days of work do not cross 10 days a month. The workers walk or cycle 25 km to reach the nearest town to find work in these markets but return empty-handed. When they get work, they return with a maximum of Rs.150 a day, which should feed them until they find more work. I have never seen such insecurity among agricultural workers in years.

Fall in labour

Sukhpal Singh of PAU says after cultivators, agricultural labour is the largest rural worker category: they account for 30.5 per cent of total workers, slightly lower than that for India as a whole (31.8 per cent). The demand for human labour in the farm sector in Punjab has decreased significantly since the late 1980s [after the introduction of technology in farming]. On the basis of per hectare labour use in the crop sector, the demand for human labour is estimated to have fallen from 479.3 million mandays in 1983-84 to 421.93 million mandays in 2000-01.

Consequently, farmers and agricultural workers are driven to suicide. A census conducted in the two districts of Bhatinda and Sangrur shows that from 2000 to 2008, there were 2,890 suicides by farmers and agricultural labourers. Of this, 1,133 (39.2 per cent) were agricultural labourers. Debt forced 1,288 farmers to take their own lives; 469 committed suicide for other reasons. While 671 farm labourers committed suicide owing to indebtedness, the remaining 462 did it for other reasons. Today, both farmers and agricultural workers fear that big farmers and agro-companies will buy off their lands and eventually they will have to work in their own fields as labourers. Their fears are not out of place. Suneet Chopra of the All India Agricultural Workers Union makes a detailed analysis of how the government is pushing farmers to the brink so that the multinational companies can take over.

The diesel price was hiked at a time when farmers were getting ready to sow the fields and required diesel. It is even worse when the supply of electricity is low for the farmers. Grains are rotting in the godowns instead of being distributed to the poor through the public distribution system. Fertilizer prices have increased, he says.

He says the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers in the first United Progressive Alliance government closed down seven public sector fertilizer plants, saying that the production costs were $120 a tonne when the country could import it for $84. But when a market like India becomes a consumer, the prices are bound to go up. Today, we are buying fertilizer for $250 a tonne. There is a complete lack of institutional finances, leading to huge debts among farmers. One must also realise the systematic neglect of agriculture and farmers. While the industrial sector gets loans at 4 per cent interest, the farmers are charged 9 per cent. This shows that the government is engineering the inflation, Chopra says.

He says the government is spending less on rural development than before. The Budget expenditure on rural development and agriculture was 15 per cent of the total Budget outlay in the early 1980s. It was 6 per cent in 2009-10, he says.

It is not a surprise then that the farmer in Punjab or Haryana has to spend around Rs.2 lakh to get a submersible motor to drain out water from the ground. The government's argument that groundwater levels are decreasing is absurd. It is its duty to provide them irrigation facilities. Because of such cruel government policies, the percentage contribution of agriculture to the GDP has come down to 15.74 per cent from nearly 30 per cent in the 1980s. However, the percentage of people working in the agrarian sector is more or less the same [around 52 per cent of the total workforce], Chopra says.

He says allowing futures trading in commodities and opening up the market to multinationals are an incentive for hoarding and contribute to inflation. During the National Democratic Alliance's regime, the Australian Wheat Board bought most of the wheat in Punjab at around Rs.850 a tonne. A food crisis in India followed, after which the government purchased the same wheat at around Rs.1,250 a tonne. In such situations, the government takes care to lure big landlords by supporting khaps and Jat Sikhs and talks about social problems as isolated ones, separate from production issues, so that real economic issues could be kept at bay, Chopra says.