Written By B D Narayankar
Question: Your views on the Opposition including Congress raising hue and cry over land acquisition bill which they term as anti-farmers and anti-poor?
SocraticNarayankar: The whole controversy stems from a pretension - and that has to be shattered. Majority of the people, mainly politicians, due to rhetoric, pretend that farmers are poor.
Are they? Look around in your offices where you work - interact with the attenders, peons and class four employees - you would know they own chunks of land and cultivate.
They in fact are landlords, not farmers, enjoying tax holiday perpetually. Agriculture is the only business which is not taxed in this country.
Yes, there are poor landless workforce. Will the bill affect them? I believe it won't. Instead they would get round-the-year employment if a factory is built on their lousy-wage-giving land.
If you flip through history books you will find the rich countries of today were poor and agrarian. They got rich by using land for industry.
SocraticNarayankar: There are few other questions that need to be answered. Those are - What is the contribution of agriculture in India's GDP; how large is the farming population, whether it is growing or declining?
And most importantly, whether pro-industry cry is necessarily anti-poor and anti-farmers?
Statistics show 53 per cent of Indians are farmers, but not everybody is an agriculturist. Beekeepers, fishery owners, chicken farmers and others make up 31 per cent.
Moreover, there is a decline in farming population, which falls by 2,000 every day.
According to 2011 Census, India had 95.8 million cultivators, less than 8 per cent of the population.
Further agriculture accounted for only around 15 per cent of India’s GDP in 2013 and the service sector accounted for over 55 per cent.
Hence, I am of the view that pro-industry is not necessarily anti-poor or anti-farmers.
Question: What the bill really contains?
SocraticNarayankar: There should be no concerns raised by farmers because the bill does not do away with the clauses of provisions on consent and social impact assessment.
These provisions do not apply in key sectors like national security, defence, infrastructure, low-cost housing and industrial corridors, and there should not have been any opposition to these exemptions.
I am of the opinion and firmly believe that the previous UPA government which was hit by various scams, in an attempt to win people's faith, introduced this bill, knowing fully well they will not come to power.
Ofcourse BJP also supported the bill because, I reiterate, the most powerful illusion in Indian politics is that farmers are poor.
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