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 Beseeching the sky

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Broken promises, greedy moneylenders, chemical fertilizer . . . these, in addition to poverty, comprise the life of marginal farmers. Neglected by the government, the dryland farmers' only hope is the monsoon which assures them a better harvest. PUSHPA SURENDRA writes on their life, and struggles that seem endless.

This year the rains have continued to play hide and seek. Last year the first showers came in the last week of April itself. When the rains continued for a week into the month of May, the farmers around Yelwal were confused by this unexpected bounty of nature. Fields were ploughed in a great hurry. Newspapers "predicted" an early and normal monsoon. The next couple of weeks saw the whole village busy. Nobody had any time to create trouble for settlers like me, by tampering with my fence to steal coconuts and fruits. There was a tremendous shortage of male farm labour for orchard owners but there was nothing to do except wait for the labour to be available. Manja who works on my farm was absent for several days on end. He boasted that this year his family would be able to harvest two crops. He was already dreaming of the extra money this would bring.

Manja's family owns seven acres of land. As the only teenage son of elderly parents, he was required to help with the ploughing, sowing and weeding work on his land as well as earn some money by doing wage labour. Boys his age were unavailable for farm work as they worked in construction sites in nearby Mysore and earned twice as much they would earn by doing agricultural work. Manja often complained to me his difficulties in not having a brother to share the burden of work and handle the village bullies as well. He and his parents were still paying debts incurred for the marriage of his older sisters. His younger sister was of some help to the family as she cut grass for the cattle, cooked food and carried it to the fields for her parents during the work season. She had come of age recently and it was not proper to send her to the fields anymore. It was not the practice in these villages to not send girls who have come of age to work outside mainly because of the fear that they might be molested. Erappana Koppalu and Karakanahalli are only 18 kms from the city!

Manja works on my farm as a permanent labourer, except for the couple of weeks during the rains. Again he was off for a month during summer, walking several miles a day in the hot sun doing the "business" of buying tamarind and pongamia seeds for one rupee a seer and selling it at the auction in Mysore for double the amount. During summer he sometimes had as much as Rs. 500 in his pocket and showed off to by asking me if I needed money urgently. He earned enough to buy seeds to sow when the rains came. I also own seven acres of land like Manja and he never lost an opportunity to remind me of it whenever I pulled him up for one thing or the other. The difference between the educated, new settler farmers like me and Manja was that he had no money to invest in a pumpset and no capital to make major investments on the land. And hence totally dependent on the monsoon, so typical of dryland farmers. The land records system is so pathetically complicated that he would never be able to avail bank loans. Even if he could, villagers like him are wary of borrowing from the bank, though the interest rates charged by moneylenders are much higher than bank interest rates. Most villagers feel more comfortable borrowing from the known village money lenders without the bother of paperwork and other formalities. The moneylenders who lend to people like Manja, use their gold as surety and borrow money from the nationalised banks at lower rates of interest and use it to lend to the villagers as usurious rates of interest.

As an organic farmer growing fruit crops with the benefit of round-the-year irrigation, I find the farming practices of my neighbours in total contrast to my way of farming. Sometimes I wonder whether the more illiterate a farmer is, the more "modern" he is. The state institutions are making "modern" farmers out of the illiterate. If crop loans are to be availed by farmers, half the loan is available in the form of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. There is absolutely no question of it being available for cow dung and organic fertilisers. Even if this policy were to change in the future it is very likely that subsidies will be available only for purchase of branded organic fertilisers which will be expensive and make the farmer dependent on the fertilisers companies. Subsidies to farmers are only to subsidise industry and not the farmers directly.

The farming practices of my neighbours have evolved as a result of their dependence on chemical fertilisers. At the very sight of the first heavy rains land is ploughed several times and dried cow dung manure incorporated into the soil. This operation is more a ritual because the quality of the cow dung exposed to the elements during the summer months loses much of its value by the time it is ploughed into the soil. Though it can be enriched with green leaves of trees such as pongamia which abounds in the area, few of them take the trouble to add this vital organic bulk into the soil. Not many of them are aware of the conditions under which cow dung has to be stored. Fields are ploughed several times, with the purpose of softening the soil as well as killing all weed growth. Weed roots are once again manually removed before sowing the seeds. The land is robbed of all organic content by constant removal of weeds. After this follows a regimen of applying chemical fertilisers when the crop is a few weeks old followed by the spraying of pesticides done routinely whether there is a pest problem or not. In the case of cotton, fertilisers are applied just as the seeds are sown.

When all this was done last year, the rains suddenly stopped followed by a spell of very hot weather shattering Manja's dreams of harvesting two crops. The villagers did not seem to complain of this misfortune as much as I did. They took it in their stride. Manja happily told me his family had enough ragi stored that would last for a year while a fellow orchard owner with glee in his voice told me that the labour situation has improved for him and looked forward to a good year with cheap labour available for agricultural work. After all how many people can be employed in the construction industry? When the rains showed no signs of returning, my neighbours started ploughing several times to prevent the soil from hardening, turning over the scorched crop and removing them.


At the end of July it started raining again, enabling the farmers to grow and harvest only one crop.


The withdrawal of fertiliser subsidies has been generally applauded as a step in the right direction. It is widely believed especially among those opposed to chemical farming that the higher prices of fertilisers will discourage farmers from buying chemical fertilisers and that is indeed welcome. It would of course encourage the rural rich to switch over to organic farming. Among those who are aware of the trends in international agriculture and popularity of organic food products, there is a marked shift to organic farming. The Mysore Pinjrapole Society, an old and well-known institution run by the Jain community, set up with the intention of protecting stray and abused animals, especially cows, supports itself financially by the sale of cow dung. Its customers for cow dung are mainly the coffee planters from nearby Coorg district and Kerala. By March this year, the society had run out of cow dung and it needed some time for their cows to replenish their stock! Those who are buying cow dung by lorry loads are mainly supplementing the chemical fertilisers. This kind of mixed farming is encouraged by the agricultural
departments and the horticultural departments through their extension programmes and so on. The "modern" farming ie., chemical farming they advocated at one time has become outdated by their own standards. With regard to the workings of the government, the situation reminds me of a statement made by a member of the Representative Assembly of erstwhile Mysore State who said "the government has neither a face nor a body that we can kick". No one need take responsibility for making the "traditional" Indian farmer "modern". The ultimate loser in this game is the small farmer who will be the last one to figure out that what is now "modern" is in fact traditional, age old practices that he was made to give up in the name of then "modern" farming.

The small dryland farmer who has lost his skills and traditional knowledge may have to be retrained in the wisdom of his forefathers in such basics as the methods of storage of cow dung and the advantages of incorporating organic bulk into the soil and natural methods of pest control. The educated and the well-to-do farmer will be able to make the shift to organic easily, also because of availability of water throughout the year. There seems to be no plan of action at the taluk and panchayat level to make the farmers understand the shift from chemical to organic methods of farming, that is becoming necessary for a variety of reasons. Rainwater harvesting is another issue that is gaining some acceptance by the government but unless the poor and marginal farmer is helped with financial incentives, it is very likely to remain a low priority work. The rainy season is short in dryland farming areas and the typical farmer has so much work to do that digging rainwater harvesting pits with the distant promise of a higher water table is not motivation enough for them to invest their time and meagre financial resources. Half their time is gone grazing cattle, mainly done by women and children or the old while men are
ploughing. Taking care of cattle, so that they do not stray into the cultivated fields may seem like underemployment to those not familiar with the burden of farming in dryland areas. There is anyway so little to graze for the cattle, if they are left unattended for a length of time they eat up not only the grass but the mud too, if they are tied to posts. The problems of farming families in dry zones are also that all work has to be done in that short period when the rains come; with smaller families, and some male members working in the cities for wage labour, the families simply cannot manage to complete all their routine work before the rains.


The agricultural and horticultural department have no clue about the ground realities. They apply their experience of government farms managed with the financial resources of the State with abundant labour to all farmers and deplore the "ignorance" and "inefficiency" of the farmer. Field visits are most uncommon. In cases of emergencies such as a pest attack, the officers have to be brought to the site by the farmers at their own expense. I had a taste of official arrogance and total lack of concern when some of my coconut trees were attacked by red palm weevil.


The slogan of yesteryears "jai jawan, jai kisan" is being revived for all kinds of opportunistic reasons. The government is forced by circumstances to take notice of the jawan but the kisan can be forgotten, though the jawan on the battle front out of uniform is the kisan on the farm front. Our politics has little means of understanding such ground realities and we sacrifice them without any care or compassion on both fronts. The kisan parties do not amount to much these days and do not have the political clout they once had. The political parties can ignore the mainstream farmer's movements and organisations that are rife with internal problems and struggles for leadership. They reflect the preoccupations of the mainstream political parties. With globalisation, it is the multinational companies that direct the agricultural policies of the government rather than any internal considerations.

The present government can afford to ignore the farmers of the country, because they have ceased to matter to their political interests. It is in such a scenario that grandiose national agricultural policies are formulated. For Manja and others like him, their life of toil and being at the mercy of the rain gods and local moneylenders will go on.

 

PUSHPA SURENDRA

poovamma@eth.net

 

Source: The Hindu (http://www.the-hindu.com)
 

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