At a time when the coun­try is grap­pling with core is­sues — State of Agri­cul­ture and State of Farm­ers — and a mas­sive ag­i­ta­tion is at­tract­ing global at­ten­tion, the Union Bud­get was a god-sent op­por­tu­nity for the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to un­der­line its in­tent to­wards the is­sue. Gov­ern­ments, this one as well as those in the past, have of­ten been guilty of mak­ing big promises and al­lo­cat­ing huge funds for pro-farmer schemes, with­out any in­ten­tion of liv­ing up to these. This gov­ern­ment has given up even on that hypocrisy.

We dis­cuss with our guests – Dr Pyara Lal Garg, a re­tired aca­d­e­mic and well known pub­lic pol­icy an­a­lyst, and Hamir Singh, a se­nior jour­nal­ist and ac­tivist known for his grasp of the rural de­vel­op­ment poli­cies and close un­der­stand­ing of the lives of those in the rural sec­tor – why the gov­ern­ment chose to bla­tantly re­duce the agri­cul­ture bud­get, cut down the MGN­REGA al­lo­ca­tion, even re­duce the ex­pen­di­ture on mid-day meal scheme, and ef­fec­tively trun­cate the health­care bud­get.

Re­mem­ber that there is a short hop from this 2021-22 bud­get and the dead­line set by the prime min­is­ter for dou­bling the farm­ers’ in­come – Au­gust 15, 2022. With no vis­i­ble progress in that di­rec­tion in the cur­rent bud­get, there is only one bud­get now that re­mains.

Where is the re­port card of cur­rent in­come lev­els of farm­ers?

As the de­bate brings out, in 1947, agri­cul­ture ac­counted for 54.4 per cent of GDP, and 60% of the pop­u­la­tion de­pended upon it. As per 2019-20 data, it ac­counted for 17% of GDP, half of the coun­try’s pop­u­la­tion de­pends upon it and it has hov­ered at around 3-4% growth rate. In the Union Bud­get 2021-22, agri­cul­ture and rural de­vel­op­ment claim 9.05% of to­tal bud­get.

While last year’s Bud­getary Es­ti­mate for Agri­cul­ture was 1.34 lakh crore, the Re­vised Es­ti­mate was 1.16 lakh crore, and the 2021-22 Bud­get al­lo­ca­tion is Rs 1.23 lakh crore, much lower than the Rs 1.34 lakh crore in the last bud­get. Clearly, the GoI is stat­ing in so many words that it cares two hoots for the farm­ers’ ag­i­ta­tion.

Shock­ingly, the Agri­cul­ture Min­istry did not even spend its full bud­get dur­ing 2020-21, and the over­all bud­getary al­lo­ca­tion to agri­cul­ture came down by 8% from last year.

It is now clear that the Modi gov­ern­ment is in­tent on what it calls “lib­er­al­is­ing the agri­cul­tural sec­tor”, a eu­phemism for de­vel­op­ing a cap­i­tal­ist mar­ket mech­a­nism with pri­or­i­ties other than as­sured crop pro­cure­ment and buffer stocks.

Even the Prad­han Mantri Fasal Bima Yo­jana (PMFBY) saw only a 4% hike, and the gov­ern­ment did­n’t even spend the al­lo­cated amount. Of the Rs 13,640 crore in 2019-20, the gov­ern­ment spent only Rs 12,639 crore. It said 7 mil­lion farm­ers ben­e­fit­ted last year even when In­dia has 120 mil­lion farm house­holds.

The low spend­ing un­der Prad­han Mantri Kisan Sam­man Nidhi (PM-Kisan) than the al­lo­cated sum was a shocker. The gov­ern­ment had al­lo­cated Rs 75,000 crore in 2020-21 Bud­get, but re­duced it to Rs 65,000 crore in RE 2020-21. One would have ex­pected an in­crease in the Rs 6,000 yearly amount. Also, there has been no talk of ex­tend­ing this PM-KISAN scheme to ten­ant farm­ers who have re­mained ex­cluded from the start.

The re­vised es­ti­mates for Prad­han Mantri Kr­ishi Sin­chayee Yo­jana (PMKSY) and In­ter­est sub­ven­tion scheme for farm­ers are also lower than the bud­get es­ti­mates by Rs. 3,173 crore and Rs. 1,343 crore, re­spec­tively.

The in­ter­est sub­ven­tion scheme aims at pro­vid­ing short term credit to farm­ers at sub­sidised in­ter­est rate. De­spite all the talk of wel­fare for farm­ers, the al­lo­ca­tion for the scheme for 2021-22 has been re­duced by 8% as the bud­get es­ti­mate for this year is lower than that for 2020-21 by Rs. 1,707 crore. This al­lo­ca­tion is, in fact, lower than the ex­pen­di­ture made on in­ter­est sub­si­dies made in 2020-21 by Rs. 364 crore or 2%.

Any gov­ern­ment could have known that in times of a rag­ing farm­ers’ ag­i­ta­tion in the coun­try, its in­ten­tion will be judged by what it does for the rural flag­ship pro­grammes cen­tred around five themes:

— Rural hous­ing (Prad­han Mantri Awas Yo­jana-Gramin)

— Rural em­ploy­ment (MGN­REGA)

— Rural con­nec­tiv­ity (PM Gram Sadak Yo­jana)

— Rural liveli­hood (Deen­dayal An­tay­o­daya Yo­jana-Nat Rural Liveli­hoods Mis­sion)

— Rural skilling (Deen­dayal Upad­hyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yo­jana and Rural Self Em­ploy­ment Train­ing In­sti­tutes).

There was no ma­jor an­nounce­ment for any of these flag­ship schemes. You can gauge the in­tent from the sta­tis­tics more clearly than from any polemics by politi­cians.

In­ci­den­tally, the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Agri­cul­ture had sub­mit­ted a re­port to Par­lia­ment on March 3, 2020 and the Gov­ern­ment of In­dia had asked all the de­part­ments to work to­wards dou­bling farm­ers’ in­come by Au­gust 15, 2022. The ICAR has pre­pared plans for each state and sent them for im­ple­men­ta­tion. But where are the de­tails? How should the states work to this end? How will the GoI analyse the progress? The Fi­nance Min­is­ter did not ut­ter a word about all this.