Two farmers – Jagtar Singh (70) and his son Kirpal Singh (42) from the Hoshiarpur district of Punjab, died by suicide because they were under heavy debt. The farmers left a suicide note in which they argued that they were upset over the Amarinder Singh government’s failure to waive the farm loans and the union government’s three farm laws.
The two owned one acre of land and were in heavy debt for the last few years. Farming has become a very underpaid profession in the last few decades, especially for the small and marginal farmers in Punjab. The three farm laws, brought by the Modi government in the winter session of the parliament, will bring private investment in the farm sector and make it profitable.
The immediate reason behind the suicide of the farmers was, obviously, debt. The majority of the small and marginal farmers of the country are under heavy debt because the previous system of subsidies (MSP, power, fertiliser, seed, and so on) benefitted only big farmers who owned large farming plots, not people like Jagtar Singh and his son Kirpal Singh, who owned just one acre of land.
The Modi government is trying to cut the leakage in the subsidy system and bring the big farmers as well as the small farmers on parity, as far as the incentives from Punjab are concerned. And, for this, the government launched the PM-KISAN Scheme, under which the farmers across the country are given 6,000 rupees per month.
The opposition is staging a protest against the three farm laws to score political points while the real reason behind the farmers’ poverty was the absence of such revolutionary farm laws. The three farm laws would do what GST did to goods and services markets – converting the whole country into a single market – to the agricultural market.
Moreover, this will encourage the industrialists across the country to invest in the Agricultural market because the government does not have enough money in the coffers to fulfil the demand for the investment in the sector, and the private players refrain from investing due to regulatory cholesterol. The three farm laws would ease the regulatory cholesterol and the sector, just like the reforms in the 1990s freed up the industrial and services sector.
The Punjab government has failed the farmers of Punjab. The previous governments – Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) under the Badals and Congress under Captain Amarinder Singh, which ruled the state for more than two decades, has contributed to the stagnation of farmers’ income by not implementing much-needed reforms and kept the farming families dependent on the doles of the state and the union government. Thus, the recent suicide of a farmer and his son in Punjab shows the Amarinder Singh government’s failure to waive the farm loans.