How Will The Congress Tackle Agrarian Distress?

Now that the Congress Party has upped the ante on the agrarian distress, BW Businessworld pieces together the farm policies it is likely to adopt should it form the government

- Prabodh Krishna

Ghana’s inspirational speaker, Israelmore Ayivor, has some quirky advice for farmers. “It’s not surprising news that manna should fall from heaven in these days,” says the author of The Great Handbook of Quotes, “But this manna will fall for those who cultivated manna farms on the clouds above!” In India, though, manna from heaven has sustained farmers for decades, irrespective of what they have sowed, since the days of the “loan melas” of the 1970s.

During the long tenures the Congress Party has had in government, it has primarily tackled farm distress by channeling cheap credit to cultivators. In 2018 the Indian National Congress (INC) posted an article titled ‘No respite from Farm distresses’ on its official portal. The article referred to the massive increase in “ground level credit to agriculture and allied activities” during the second term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. Credit flow to agriculture shot up then from 9.19 percent in 2011-12 to 15.75 percent in 2014-15, before dipping to 8.28 percent in 2015-16, when the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was at the helm on Raisina Hill.

Indeed, the Congress Party’s strategy for agriculture has oscillated between cheap credit for farmers and loan waivers, taking the non-performing assets (NPAs) of banks from agriculture to abominable heights. In 2002 the overall institutional credit given for agriculture had been Rs 53, 713 crores which jumped four-fold to Rs 2,40,803 crore in 2008-09 (the first term of the UPA).