Nobody can deny that the present government has started taking agriculture very seriously. The 50 percent addition to the import bill because of the need to fetch wheat, sugar and canola oil from the international market, that too at the inopportune time when prices are flirting with highs not seen in quite a while, clearly seems to have shaken the federal cabinet. So now, after giving agriculture centre-stage in the budget and rolling out the Kisan Card, we have the Kisan Portal which will enable the poorest of the lot to deliver their grievances directly to the “corridors of power”, in the PM’s own words.
This is no doubt very commendable. The PM also enlightened everybody, at the launch ceremony of the portal, how research shows that 90 percent of farmers are very small ones and hence “face the most difficulties”. Nothing better, then, than to enable them to reach chief secretaries directly with their problems, with the PM’s own promise hanging over the bureaucracy’s head like a sword, so we can eliminate all the corruption, increase production, sanitise the import bill and put some lipstick on the current account, so to speak.
Still, since this is a rather elaborate scheme and the agri package does involve a lot of subsidies just when the IMF (International Monetary Fund) is red-flagging all such handouts, it raises a few important questions that haven’t yet been answered. One, since most farmers are very small ones, they also dwell at the very bottom of the food chain. As such a lot of them are either cut off from modern communication technology, have neither the time nor the money for it, or in some cases don’t even know of some of its fine points. Therefore, a lot of them would have to be schooled in using portals meant to take their plight to chief secretaries. So what, if anything, has the government planned to do about educating 90 percent of the farmer force?
Two, the need for this portal was felt because of the widespread practice of big farmers using state machinery to sideline small farmers and have fake cases registered against them, etc. But since the state machinery they use is the bureaucracy, of which chief secretaries are the shining stars, and if they (CS) had been doing what was required of them the need for such steps would never even have arisen, what differences will routing the same concerns through a portal really make when big farmers still have the same resources at their disposal? Or are we to expect another portal very soon that will keep check on how the civil service handles the complaints?
And three, doesn’t the government already know pretty much all the problems faced by small farmers? And didn’t the PM list almost all of them during his speech at the launch? Is the government really expecting to find something that had escaped its notice all these years? And does it expect such information to turn the entire sector around, increase production, reduce imports and balance the budget?
All this is in no way meant to imply that the portal is not a good idea. Yet when a sitting government decides to employ considerable time and resources to turn a specific sector around, especially when it doesn’t have much of either, then it is expected to first plug the holes that are causing the biggest leakages. Therefore, while the portal is a very fine idea, surely, things like this will work better when they are accompanied by state action that addresses problems that are already very well known to everybody. In simple words, rather than wait for the portal to raise the same concerns that have already been raised for decades, wouldn’t it be better to initiate both steps at the same time; if not let necessary action precede the portal novelty?
Either way, the government is right to pin its hopes on agriculture. If its plans to revive this sector succeed, whether by stumbling onto the right approach or engineering it through meticulous planning, then it would have done farmers, consumers, the economy and the entire country a very big favour.
