1. The agrarian crisis continues to spread and deepen. Instead of addressing any of the structural dimensions of the crisis, whether by way of increasing public investment in agriculture or making better infrastructural facilities and cheap and easy credit available to the agricultural population or carrying out progressive reforms in land and other agrarian relations that could improve the lot of actual producers, the central and state governments continue to push the neo-liberal policy package in the agrarian arena, resulting in further aggravation of the crisis of Indian agriculture and the plight of the real producers including rural labourers.
2. Token government measures like occasional loan-waivers announced usually as a vote-catching tactic during elections have failed to provide any relief to the debt-ridden peasantry and the shame of peasant suicides continues unabated. The figure of peasant suicides since 1995 has exceeded 300,000 and despite government assurances of stopping suicides, at least one suicide is being recorded every thirty minutes, as pointed out in the shocking study “Every thirty minutes: Farmer suicides, human rights, and the agrarian crisis in India” carried out by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the New York University School of Law. The number will go up considerably if one includes cases of suicides of members of peasant families. Starvation deaths too continue unabated. While the state is afraid of admitting starvation deaths, it is an established fact that chronic hunger and malnutrition is the biggest cause of death in India, accounting annually for more than two million deaths.
3. Massive acquisition – often by forcible and fraudulent means – and relentless diversion of agricultural land into non-agricultural use has begun to pose a serious threat to food security. The availability of net cultivable land is further declining because of problems like soil erosion, desertification and increase in salinity, and lack of planned and effective measures to ensure soil improvement and land reclamation. The boastful claims of self-sufficiency in production of food grains are giving way to growing dependence on food imports. According to a study of land-deals worldwide since 2000, India figures among the top 10 countries accounting for a loss of 4.6 million hectares of agricultural land (out of an estimated global diversion of 70.2 million hectares).
4. In the face of stiff resistance by peasants and adivasis across the country, central and state governments have had to abandon or defer some of the most scandalous land acquisition projects, Nandigram in West Bengal, Niyamgiri (Vedanta) in Odisha, and Raigad (Reliance) in Maharashtra being the most notable examples. More recently, the government of Maharashtra has been forced to scrap four major proposed SEZ projects that would have entailed land acquisition of the order of about 9,000 acres. In many cases land-losers have managed to secure improved rates or packages of compensation. But there are also many cases of land remaining locked in litigation even though the projects for which the land had been acquired have not materialized, Singur being the most notable instance.
5. Yet even as peasants and adivasis succeed in halting or stopping acquisition in some pockets the onslaught continues in other areas. Defying widespread protests, the Odisha government has unleashed police repression to forcibly acquire land for POSCO, and in the north-western part of the country central and state governments are busy pushing through a massive land acquisition drive for the 1,483-km-long Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor project. Large-scale land acquisition and eviction is going on in the name of construction of power projects and development of nature parks and eco-tourism zones. In the hill state of Uttarakhand where agricultural land is as little as 10% as many as 558 hydel power projects are being constructed with the Tehri dam alone resulting in the submergence of 1.5% agricultural land and eviction of an equal proportion of the state’s population. In coastal Tamil Nadu, more than 84,000 acres of land are being acquired by thermal power plants and petro-chemical complexes. And across the country, land acquisition is going on in the name of widening of roads and setting up of power plants or private universities and colleges.
