MOHAN GURUSWAMY:
With elections imminent the crisis that Punjab faces is once again not figuring in the political discourse. Punjab can be transformed into a Garden of Eden with an abundance of foods, but the policies of the past have turned it into a costly producer of wheat and rice that is no longer needed. The artificially sustained economy has not only caused over production but has poisoned the soil with excessive fertiliser and pesticide use, and the minds of young people with easily available Pakistani heroin. The likes of Amrinder, Sukhbir Badal, Navjyot Sidhu or Arvind Kejriwal dont have the honesty to tell Punjab the truth.
I recall travelling through Punjab in the early 1980s with an English economist. As we drove through the golden fields laden with wheat, and noticing the general lifestyles and carriage of people, I remarked to my companion that if all of India came close to this prosperity, the country would be a major global economy. Those were the times when Punjab was India’s model state. It was number one in almost every field. From being the role model state it has now become a national burden. How this happened is a lesson to policy makers?
Punjab has the best agricultural and most irrigated land in the country. The total geographical area of Punjab is 5.036 million hectare and the cultivable area is 4.20 million hectare (83.4% of total geographical area) and the net area sown is 4.023 million hectare (95.7% of cultivable area). The net irrigated area is 4.019 million hectare (By canals- 26.2%, by tube wells- 72.5% and by others – 1.3%). The total number of land holdings are 10.93 lakh out of which 2.04 lakh (18.7%) are marginal farmers, 1.83 lakh (16.7%) small farmers and 7.06 lakh (64.6%) farmers holding land above 2 hectare. You will not see this bounty and equitable distribution of acreage anywhere else in the country.
Punjab’s hardy and enterprising Jat peasants, dispossessed of their lands in west Punjab due to the partition, found a land just as welcoming and put their energies and genius into making the best of it. When India faced crippling food shortages in the early 1950’s and 60’s s, it depended on Punjab to bail it out. Its enterprising peasants were quick to adopt the new varieties that came out of the field laboratories of Norman Borlaug. To incentivize its farmers the central government began a policy of procurement assuring producers of a ready market and increasingly better prices.
This was the beginning of the Green Revolution (and with it the ruination of Punjab’s economic future). From a breadbasket state it has now become a basket case, that is engorged on huge subsidies such as MSP, free electricity, hugely subsidized fertilizers and de-risked markets. So much so, today the market price of a quintal of wheat is about Rs.5-600 less than the Minimum Support Price at which the state buys. As the gap between MSP and market prices kept widening it only incentivized more production. Even so over 75% of wheat and paddy grown in Punjab and Haryana is procured by Central and State agencies under MSP.
The green revolution spread to some other parts of the country, but the largesse is concentrated in Punjab and Haryana. India now finds itself in a situation when it produces more than it eats. The production has been in the vicinity of 285 million tons during the past three years. India has food reserves of 82 million tons that is 2.7 times more than is needed.
There is no doubt that Punjab is a major food grains production centre, but the notion that it feeds India is quite exaggerated. In the year 2019-20 of the total national food grains production was 292 million tons, of which Punjab produced about 11.06%. Admittedly Punjab’s productivity is much higher than the rest of the country’s as it accounts for only about 5% of the 54 million hectares of irrigated farmland.
The truth is the rest of India supports Punjab, with this absurd minimum support price (MSP) scheme, which is actually an above the market price scheme. The bulk of the procurement accrues in the states of Punjab, Haryana, AP and MP. Which means the bulk of the MSP subsidy accumulates here. Punjab stays way ahead of rest of the states in the country.
In fact, Punjab’s farm subsidy is higher than the annual income for farmers in the rest of the country. Each Punjabi agricultural household gets an annual subsidy of Rs 1,73,165. According to SBI’s NAFIS survey, the annual income of agricultural households becomes Rs. 2,77,596 which is higher than twice the national average.
God and this country both have both been generous to Punjab. Today if 82% of all land in Punjab is arable and 98.6% of it is with perennial irrigation, more than half of this is due to the huge central government projects, Bhakra Nangal being the most notable among them. The British in their quest for land revenue rightly chose composite Punjab for special attention. They invested in its irrigation. But after 1947 this trend accelerated in Indian Punjab.
In the year 1955 the total national outlay for irrigation was Rs.29, 106.30 lakhs. Of this Punjab got Rs.10, 952.10 lakhs or 37.62%. By contrast Bihar got only Rs.1, 323.30 lakhs, which is only 4.54% of the irrigation outlay.
Punjab has also benefited by a disproportionately large recruitment into the armed and paramilitary forces giving most rural families a second stream of income. Each year about 60,000 Punjabi officers and men retire from the armed forces and over a million households benefit from the generous pensions. Yet Punjab is afflicted with a severe blight.
A study by the department of Social Security Development of Women and Children found that 67 percent households in Punjab have at least one person addicted to drugs. Yet another study by the Narcotics Control Bureau discovered that an astounding 51.6% (?) of youth in Punjab are addicted to drugs. Even if this is exaggerated it is still indicative of the dimensions of the blight. So what has brought Punjab to this pass?
Clearly it is that Punjab has been reeling under bad governments. Its politicians and their bureaucratic fellow conspirators, irrespective of party affiliations, have been among the country’s most venal and corrupt. The porous Indo-Pak border and the situation in Pakistan have only intensified the criminalization of its government and border communities.
Yet other one is the predicament of youth in the state. The state’s school dropout is among the highest in the country. Young Punjabis today do not want to study, do not want to compete or ride the wave of reform and growth in India. They want to escape and run to low-level services overseas or fill up European jails as illegals and drug peddlers. This brawn drain of sorts is modern Punjab’s answer to the South’s brain drain.
Unless Punjab gets a better government and better governance that addresses all the persisting impediments, the downfall will continue.
Mohan Guruswamy
Email: mohanguru@gmail.com
12 January 2022
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