The Pathetic Indian Farmer!

Majority of them were heavily indebted peasants from several remote India.  The root causes of their failure in agriculture were all common like repeated droughts, incessant floods, spurious seeds, fake fertilizers and ineffective insecticides – dumped on those innocents by the crooked traders and as a result the mounting debts with the usurers (comprising local lenders, the NBFCs, i.e. Non-Banking Financial Institutions, later renamed as Micro-Finance Corporations) at exorbitant interest rates, some as high as 36% to 80%, per year, with loan repayment cycles as short as 25 to 30 weeks, while the installments were collected on a weekly basis, attracting compounding of interest & the principal amount, on missing of even one installment.  The defaulting farmers along with their guiltless families were subjected to mental harassment, physical abuses and forced collections by appointed ‘Collection Agents”  of those entities – whose sole qualification was Goondaism comprising, muscle power, throat power and abilities to use, freely, cuss-words, swear-words and what have you?  Those who haven’t committed suicides had tried to be employed somewhere on this Earth.

The reason why Indian farms have become the way they are was excess drawl of the ground water, without providing for ground-water recharge that resulted on account of unplanned & rapid urbanization, gross neglect of hamlet & village level irrigation tanks, and building mega irrigation projects, where there was greater money for everyone to earn than in maintaining those tanks, which have been feeding millions of acres of farmlands, since millennia.

And why these weak farmers couldn’t access the farm credit schemes of the respective state and the central government, at reasonable, simple interest rates varying between 9% to 12% calculated on yearly basis, while the loan repayments are longer with equally longer cycles, based on the crop seasons – was because most of the allocated funds were siphoned off by the money-bags – most using the names of those illiterate and hapless farmers, themselves, without even their knowledge – under fake loan agreements with the agricultural cooperatives and banking institutions, with the active connivance of the successive governments and the hierarchy.  Most of the times, they would come to know those loans, accounted in their names, for the first time, only when the officials of those bodies go and confiscate their live stock, homes, farms and every other possessions.