Manmohan, the "Refarmer." This is how a pink daily recently eulogised Manmohan Singh. Note the pun in the title "Refarmer." The paper conferred the title on him for the relief package he had offered to Vidharbha region in Maharashtra where suicides by farmers had reached some three a day in the month of May 2006 alone! To make Manmohan Singh, the reformer, into Manmohan Singh, the Refarmer, it just cost over 500 suicides in the Vidharba region alone over the last one year and Rs 3,750 crore! Normally, farmers' suicides never get highlighted as they take place in remote places and in ones and twos a day. The Vidharba suicides would never have become a national issue but for the infamous "Register of Deaths" maintained by the Vidharba Jana Andolana Samiti, an organisation of farmers in Vidharba which had tenaciously kept the record of suicides to shock the national conscience. The register showed a tally of 540 for the cotton crop year June 2005 to May 2006 - three-fifths of which were between January and May 2006 and in the month of May alone over 80! The samiti successfully shocked the nation to take note. The Prime Minister had to go to Vidharba to know, thanks to the policies he himself had inspired, what was happening to Indian farming and farmers.

The Prime Minister announced a relief of Rs 3,750 crore for them and got the new title of Refarmer. He also told the pink paper how important it was to have `inclusive growth'. This new cliche admits that 15 years of growth had excluded the farmers. But the problem is that the very reform is inclusive of high risk to Indian farming, for instance the WTO. The Prime Minister returned to the Capital only to read on the next day after he had announced the package and won the new title, in the very pink paper, "PM back: picture gets gloomier as 4 more commit suicide in state." Ironically, on the same day, the paper screamed that `Manmohan's inclusive growth mantra is a big hit' and quoted Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Prime Minister's trusted aide, as saying `achieving inclusiveness with fast growth is the greatest challenge'. Thus goes on the Manmohan-Montek-pink discourse on Indian farming when continuing suicides despite relief clearly indicate the rural disease cannot be treated with antibiotics.

Long ago, in the eyes of Indian elites, Dr Singh had turned both the Adam and the Smith, that is, the beginner and the architect, of Indian economic reforms. Manmohanomics became the Bible of reforms and deviations from it were dismissed as heretic, anti-reform. But most of Manmohanomics consisted of the IMF or the World Bank wish-list. The good thing about Dr Singh was that he voluntarily did much of what the Bank and the Fund would have pressurised India to do, thus protecting our sovereignty! Dr Singh and his trusted lieutenant, Montek, had spent some of their best years, when they were more alert, agile and willing to learn, abroad, away from India. And a lot of it with the Bank and the Fund. Ironically, neither the West nor the Bank and the Fund or the Singh couple have had any experience of anything similar to agriculture or villages or farmers of the scale and complexity as the Indian.

Thus, the two chief policy makers of India had learnt much of their reform models from agro-industrial and rural-urban demographies of the West which have very little in common with India's. For instance, the country which the elite economists here look up to, the US, has less than 2 percent of its population engaged in farming. It has no rural population worth the name. The Western country with highest rural activity is France, a tenth of whose population lives on agriculture. Rightly, the West regards urbanisation as development. India is a contrast. Over 70 percent of Indians live in villages. More than two-thirds of them live on agricultural activities. Even its urban population is largely linked to rural households, making the rural-urban divide grey rather than black and white. Also much of Indian farming is less than commercial, for own consumption. Yes, agriculture in India is different, cannot be equated to the Western. Yet we are confused about how to position our villages in our development strategy. While with one eye rural migration to urban India is seen as an economic, ecological and even sociological, disaster, with another, urbanisation is seen as index of development! But, really both are two sides of the same coin. So what we promote as development is intrinsically a disaster! This conflict has distorted our approach to the Uruguay negotiations that led to WTO where instead of seeking a special status for our rural economy, we sought a level playing field for it with the Western. Result, they protected their agriculture from us, but we exposed ours to them. Thus, with exports denied for our agro-products, internal reforms are forcing down rural income and agricultural prices, turning our agriculture uneconomic. This is the real crisis.

Regrettable, but true, that the Prime Minister and his advisor are under-experienced on rural India. While Lalu will be an expert on villages and their economy, Manmohan or Montek is a novice on rural India. Equally, the way Manmohan and Montek understand the West, Lalu cannot. Result, Lalu cannot engage the West and Manmohan and Montek cannot handle rural India. That is, the decision-maker does not know India and the knower cannot be the decider! This is the hard reality in Indian polity. Added to this, their leader Sonia, regarded by many as `Super PM', was not even born in India. She is a born alien, not just alienated from rural areas like the Prime Minister and his advisor. Can the alien leader and her alienated Prime Minister and his advisor work solutions for Indian farmers?

Courtesy: gurumurthy.net/indianexpress.html, July 11, 2006