Farmers are being forced to become domestic servants to the urban rich who have benefited from the eight to nine per cent growth in the Indian economy, P Sainath has said.

Sainath, the author of the famous book ‘Everybody Loves A Good Drought’ said, while 65 per cent of Indians live on agriculture, the government policies remained focused on industry. “Crisis in agriculture is a result of wrong policies — from bank loan to fertiliser, electricity to water distribution,” he said. Even the policy of minimum support price worked against the farmer,  “Interest on a loan for a Mercedes Benz is charged at six to eight per cent while it is 12 to 15 per cent on a tractor loan. This means the credit system is meant for the goodies of high, middle and lower middle class and not for poor farmers who are being driven to commit suicides.”

Commenting on the new policy of the government, which claims it is committed to protecting the interests of agriculture, Sainath said, “in India agriculture is a way to death.”

He said over 100,000 farmers have committed suicide in the past few years.

“Up to the last three decades, a farmer would run to the city and take up a job in a factory. He became a factory labourer and now when the economy is growing at eight to nine per cent, he is being reduced to a domestic servant,” the noted agriculture and rural affairs journalist said in an interview.

“In Delhi alone, 200,000 tribal girls from natural resource-rich Jharkhand work as domestic servants. It is a cruel joke with them because tribals never want to leave their land,” he said.  According to the government data, 40 per cent of farmers want to shift to other sectors.

“I have remained attached to villages and my experience shows that over 80 per cent of them want to do anything but agriculture.”

According to the Approach Paper to the 11th Five Year Plan, crisis in the rural economy erupted in the middle of the nineties. But Sainath said the trouble is as old as 40 years.

“The crisis is not an outcome of natural calamities but is a result of following anti-farmer policies,” he said.

Commenting on India becoming among the fastest growing economies in the world, he said it was all job-less. “While corporate profit is on a rise, employment figure is on a decline.”

Sainath did not seem impressed with the increase in the credit growth for the farm sector. On the contrary, over 3,000 rural banks have downed their shutters in the last decade. Between 1991 and 2003, the coverage of banks in the rural areas has come down from 58 per cent to 48 per cent.

Those responsible for creating a mammoth Rs 1,10,000 crore non-performing assets for the government-owned banks are being given the benefit of macro credit policies. “Poor farmers are trapped in the commercial cycle of micro credit,” he said.