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| THE MISSING FARMERS’ | | |
Dr. Parveen Kumar
Agriculture sector in the country is under distress. One way this distress is manifested is through a large number of farmer suicides. This unfortunate aspect of Indian agriculture is attributed to various factors like high production costs and low profitability, weather uncertainties resulting in production losses, the debt trap on the farmers, the land tenure insecurities and many other such related factors. Of these victims of farm suicides, the most vulnerable segment has been the tenant farmers and the sharecroppers referred to as the missing farmers. As per the National Crime Records Bureau’s Accidental Deaths and Suicide in India 2016 report, released in November 2019, nearly 1,000 tenant farmers committed suicide during the year. The saddest part of their suicides is that the loss of lives of these tenants seldom gets attention.
While a tenant farmer is one who usually does not own any land and works on land owned by a landlord, tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management. In some cases tenant farmers also contribute their labor along with at times varying amounts of capital and management. Depending on the contract, tenants can make payments to the owner either of a fixed portion of the product, in cash or in a combination. The rights the tenant has over the land, the form, and mode of payment varies across systems. In some systems, the tenant could be evicted at whim (tenancy at will); in others, the landowner and tenant sign a contract for a fixed number of years (tenancy for years or indenture). In most developed countries today, at least some restrictions are placed on the rights of landlords to evict tenants under normal circumstances.
TENANT FARMING VS SHARECROPPING:
In tenant farming, tenants live in the same land and engage in agricultural practices for a given period, and finally get their payments as money, fixed amount of crop, or in combination. • In the case of sharecropping, tenant receives his portion as a share. He has to give a share to the landowner, which is pre decided. In share cropping both, the tenant and the landowner, take the risk of harvest, while the tenant farming gives the total risk to the tenant, as the landowner receives a fixed amount of crop or a tax for his land. However, tenants are engaged in both sharecropping and tenant farming.
PREVALENCE OF TENANT FARMING:
The All India Rural Financial Inclusion Survey (2016-17) of National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) indicates growing tendency of agricultural households to lease-in land for agricultural use. At the All India level, 12% households leased-in agricultural lands. Tenant farming was 20.6% of the operating area according to 8th round of NSSO Report in 1953-54. In 2002-03, it fell sharply to just 6.6% of the operating area.
But post liberalization, during 2003-13, tenancy increased to 10.4%. Andhra Pradesh (35.7%), Bihar (22.7%), Haryana (14.8%), Odisha (16.9 %), TN (13.5%) and WB (14.7%) lead the tenancy league, far above the all-India average of 10.4%. Interestingly, many of these states are key suppliers of interstate migrants (56 million, as per 2011 census). Now, this percentage has grown up to 17 at all India level. Also per 70th round of NSSO Report (2013), the share of small and marginal farmers in the total leased-in land is 52%, whereas the share of large farmers is only 7%. As tenancy in most of the Indian states is not legally permissible, so the case might be that the incidence of tenancy is under-reported in these surveys as tenancy.
THE MISERIES OF TENANTS’:
Tenant farmers account for 80% of farmers’ suicides in the country. Tenant farmers rarely get bank credit and they do not get any subsidies. The government has also launched so many programmes aimed at their financial help viz Kisan Credit Card (KCC) and social mobilization like Self Help Groups (SHGs), Commodity Interest Groups (CIGs), Joint Liability Groups (JLGs), but all such programmes have not been of any use for tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Even with Kisan Credit Cards (KCC) and JLGs in place, tenant farmers receive barely 3% of total farm credit. Loan waivers have not helped tenant farmers as a significant number of crop loans are availed by the land owners even when they are not the actual cultivators. Tenant farmers with no documentary evidence become ineligible for crop insurance under PM Fasal Bima Yojana. State level panel data of NABARD indicates that a 10% increase in agricultural growth leads to a 2.1% rise in GDP. But uneconomic holdings, lack of adequate credit flow and poor insurance cover to the tenant farmers prevent such growth. The Government of India is now providing rupees 6,000 per year to the farming community of the country in three installments of rupees 2,000 each under the Primeminister Kisan Samman Nidhi (PMKISAN). This amount is directly credited into the account of the farmers just before the beginning of the cropping seasons in the country. But the PMKISAN too has excluded tenants and sharecroppers due to the absence of authentic and credible database of tenant cultivators. Without a legal framework for tenant farmers, the benefits intended for these producers are not reaching them and will also never reach them. Access to inputs, credit and technology, besides insurance cover and crop damage assistance during a disaster is a far cry for this vulnerable community.
THE WAY FORWARD:
It is vital to cover the vulnerable section of tenant farmers with credit and insurance, alongside other farming issues, for an inclusive policy outlook.
Urgent and serious reforms are needed to improve their condition; who have a vital contribution in the food basket of the country. This can be done by legalizing it and by enacting legislations aimed at ensuring land tenure security for them so as to enable them to take benefits of the government schemes and policies. Kerala is the only state in the country to enact the Money Lending Act, protecting borrowers from high rates of interest and tenants from excesses in private debt. The Andhra Pradesh government has adopted and refined the implementation process under the AP Licensed Cultivators’ Act 2011. It undertook digitization of land records and created a web land portal. Loan Eligibility Cards (LEC) or a Certification of Cultivation is issued by the designated authority of revenue or agriculture department. A standard operating procedure has been put in place for the banks to record the crop loans issued to all farmers including tenants, on the web land portal. As the Indian economy becomes mature and inclusive, tenancy is likely to increase further. Urbanization has made inroads into the rural landscape, and with land being scarce there is severe demand for it. Tenancy and sharecropping have become livelihood options in agriculture to supplement incomes arising out of lesser availability of land.
As agriculture is a state subject, all such reforms need to be implemented while taking states on board.
These implemented in the right spirit with the cooperation of states have the potential to unleash the growth of the agricultural sector. Land reforms by many states, post-Independence consisted of abolition of intermediaries, redistribution of ceiling surplus lands to poor and consolidation of landholdings. Now, with the dynamics of agricultural development, reducing landholding size and the need for occupational mobility by taking surplus manpower from agriculture, land leasing is viewed as an ‘economic necessity’ and not merely as a feature of ‘semi-feudal agrarian structure. Various think tanks and government panels have advocated legalization of land leasing to bring private investments into the sector and conserve agricultural land. In the year 2016, the NITI Aayog had circulated a Model Land Leasing Act to all the states wherein it had given a flexible template to the states to design state-specific legislations. Rent on leased land, period of lease, etc, have been suggested to be freely negotiated by the parties concerned (landowner lessers and lessee cultivators) without any interference from the government.
An inclusive growth agenda requires that tenant farmers’ issues of both debt and insurance be tackled. Agricultural insurance needs to be decoupled from crop loans. Farmers’ assets (crop husbandry, animal husbandry, poultry, horticulture and family assets) need to be insured irrespective of owned or leased-in.
Other relevant measures for tenant farming may include creating a legal framework for the States, issuance of loan eligibility cards, ensuring that banks lend to cultivators and not owners, creation of web-based land portals after digitizing land records, setting targets for short-term production credit for tenant farmers, formation of JLGs. The other reforms may include Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) to tenant farmers following an affidavit of self-declared tenancy conditions and crop(s) grown can help significantly. NABARD can also go for creating a separate budget for refinancing schemes associated with the upliftment of tenant farmers. The tenant farmers should also be made a part of the various skill development programmes. |
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