Recently, Rakesh Tikait, national spokesperson of Bharatiya Kisan Union, called for a kisan-mazdoor mahapanchayat in Sikandarpur tehsil of Ballia in the Purvanchal region of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Tikait urged the farmers there to participate in the ongoing farmers’ agitation against the agri laws, at Delhi.
However, many of the farmers who attended the March 10 mahapanchayat went back disappointed as no mention was made of the problems of landless farmers in Purvanchal. The farmers had hoped Tikait would bring up the issues of minimum support price (MSP) and the struggles of sharecroppers. That did not happen.
Purvanchal is made up of 17 districts and has 117 MLAs (Members of Legislative Assembly) and 23 Lok Sabha members. It has been home to many political stalwarts, including Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar Singh. Some of the most fertile stretches of land in the country fall in this area.
The doab (land between the rivers Ganga and Yamuna) has the highest production of wheat, with the district of Gorakhpur topping the list — the average yield is 42.36 quintals of wheat per hectare. The districts that fall in the lowlands or the terai region, such as Ballia, Deoria, Mau, Gazipur and Jaunpur cultivate paddy.
Nevertheless, nine of Purvanchal’s 17 districts are among the poorest in the state. The annual per capita income of the 17 districts of Purvanchal in the year 2011-12 was Rs 13,058, which is three-fourth of the per capita income of Uttar Pradesh (Rs 18,249), and about one-third of the country’s per capita income. The farmers in this densely populated region of eastern Uttar Pradesh are struggling to survive.
Ajit Rai, one of the conveners of Tikait’s kisan mahapanchayat and a Bhartiya Kisan Union functionary, has 6.5 bighas (1.6 hectares of farming land). “I cultivate just enough for my personal consumption so that I don’t have to buy grains. I do fish farming on more than half my cultivable land, because I am unable to get proper rates for my foodgrains,” he told Gaon Connection.
Seventy five per cent of Purvanchal farmers are landless, claimed Vallabh Pandey, a sharecropper who cultivates six bighas (1.5 hectares) in Kaithi village, Varanasi district. While the land is in the name of his two brothers and himself, it is Pandey who cultivates it. He does not get the benefit of any government scheme, including flood or drought relief. There is no written agreement between the landowner and the sharecropper. He does not even get the benefit of subsidised fertilisers and seeds.
Replying to a question by the Bharatiya Janata Party MP Manoj Rajoria in the Lok Sabha, Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar stated on February 9 last month, “There has been no specific census or survey of landless farmers in the country. Therefore, the number of landless farmers is not available. Agriculture and land are state subjects, and the role of the central government is only advisory.”
The NITI Aayog’s Model (Agricultural) Land Leasing Act 2016 protects the ownership rights of the land owner and seeks to provide facilities such as bank loans and insurance for the sharecropper as well. The number of farmers with smaller holdings is more than 86 per cent in the country. However, as few landowners have any written agreement with the sharecropper or the contract cultivator, the latter cannot claim any benefit.
Most farmers in Purvanchal, including in Gorakhpur, Ballia and Varanasi, have small and medium holdings. In Purvanchal, most of the land is cultivated on sharecropping basis and landless farmers have their own unique challenges and setbacks, which keeps them from availing the benefits of government schemes and MSP.
The state of subsidy on fertilisers and seeds
The government passes on fertiliser subsidies directly to companies. For instance, the price of urea is Rs 1,166 for a 50-kg bag but it is made available to the farmer at Rs 266.
“A farmer can be given a maximum of fifty sacks of urea a year. All he needs to claim this is an Aadhaar card,” Raju Tiwari, a fertiliser godown operator at Bansdih in Ballia, told Gaon Connection.
“Seeds are also provided on subsidy to farmers having land in their name. A maximum of five sacks of wheat seeds of forty kilos each are provided at a fifty per cent subsidy. For this, the farmer has to register on the portal of Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi. The farmer buys the seeds and the subsidy is transferred to the bank account,” a seed depot operator at the nyay panchayat level in Ghazipur explained to Gaon Connection.
He added there was no provision to provide these subsidised seeds or fertilisers to landless farmers. Only those who had land in their names could avail of the facility.
“The entire responsibility of the land falls on the sharecropper once she borrows the land from its owner,” Malti Devi, who has been cultivating on a sharecropping basis in the doab region of Ballia for two decades, told Gaon Connection. All farming expenses from weeding to harvest are borne by her and she has to give away half the produce to the owner.
“After giving away half, we are left with barely enough food to sustain ourselves and the situation becomes worse if there is a drought,” Devi pointed out.
Costs and profits
In Chakchitu village of Ballia, Prem Prakash Upadhyay cultivates five acres (2.02 hectares) of land. He owns only a part of it; the rest, he cultivates as a sharecropper.
“Before the diesel price hike, for one acre of wheat to be cultivated, the total expenditure, including the cost of labour, seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, was more than twelve thousand rupees,” Upadhyay explained.
In Purvanchal, farmers use pumpsets that require diesel, and this costs them Rs 150 an hour to use. It takes six to seven hours to irrigate an acre, and in favourable conditions, one acre yields about 15 quintals (1.5 metric tonnes) of wheat.
Last year, the MSP of wheat was Rs 1,925 a quintal, but farmers like Upadhyay ended up getting only Rs 1,500 to Rs 1,600 a quintal. “So, a crop that should have ideally earned us twenty eight thousand rupees or more, got us only about twenty three thousand rupees,” Upadhyay explained. If the farmer is a sharecropper, half the cultivated crop is kept aside for the owner. “It leaves so little for the landless farmer,” Upadhyay said.
Purvanchal, a victim of political neglect
“The soil of Purvanchal region is among the most fertile in the country, but the failure of the government support system resulted in the weakening of regional farming. Purvanchal has suffered political apathy,” DC Rai, the head of the department of animal Husbandry at the Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, told Gaon Connection.
“The government has neither given any serious consideration to Purvanchal nor have the local leaders delivered on promises,” Rai said. “The farmers here focus only on paddy and wheat cultivation, ignoring new forms and methods of cultivation,” he said.
