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| Waist-high in debt: Gopriram Dhamad, a farmer in Rohtak, has taken out one loan at 24 percent interest to pay off another. Mark Sappenfield |
India's farmers doubt Delhi's big aid pledge
Many don't believe the government's Feb. 29 plan to waive debts will be fulfilled.
By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the March 11, 2008 edition
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ROHTAK, INDIA - Alongside a rural highway here thronged with farm tractors and cars, there is one sign more common than any ad for prime real estate or the wisdom of local gurus. It is a political billboard, campaign-style, stating that the government has essentially saved India's small farmers by pledging $15 billion in the new budget to pay their chronic debts.
Not far from the highway, Gopiram Dhamad stands, waist-high in his wheat field – and in debt. He has taken a loan from a moneylender at 24 percent interest just to pay the interest on a larger loan of $3,750. How he will pay any of it back while living on about 50 cents a day seems impossible.
Mr. Dhamad is precisely the sort of farmer the government is trying to save from hopelessness and perhaps even death – more than 17,000 indebted farmers in India committed suicide in 2006 alone. Yet he doesn't expect a cent from the government scheme, which was announced in the annual budget on Feb. 29, saying that previous efforts have been beset by corruption and inefficiency.
In other parts of the country, where the crisis of suicides is the greatest, experts say the plan is poorly drawn. By excluding farmers with more than five acres, it leaves out those who are most at risk.
With elections coming up in states across India this year, the plan is a populist attempt to boost the fortunes of the ruling Congress party, analysts say. But the reaction from many members of the farming community suggests that Congress's electoral trump card might have been misplayed.
"It will be helpful, but it won't help the people most affected," says Yudhvir Singh of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), or Indian Farmer's Union.
The waiver is expected to reach 4 million farmers who own fewer than five acres, in a country where two-thirds of its 1.1 billion people depend on agriculture.
The plan has its supporters. This past weekend, the Congress Party held a rally in New Delhi for farmers. The thousands who came thanked Congress for saving them from ruin.
Yet it was a political rally – Congress's opening volley in what is sure to be a summer of intense campaigning.
Here in Rohtak, a farming town an hour west of Delhi, the atmosphere is decidedly different. A crowd of men has gathered in the courtyard of the local chapter of the BKU. In a March heat that gives more than a hint of summer, flies buzz around cups of sweet milk tea like tiny clouds of shifting smoke, while turbaned men sit on beds of woven rope in the welcome shade that a nearby tree provides.
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