As the lockdown lingers, keep a watch on the farm sector

In our fight against Covid-19, lockdown 1.0 lasted 21 days. Lockdown 2.0, which is now nearing the end, is for 19 days. We are already gearing for lockdown 3.0, and one doesn’t know how long will falling agricultural incomes and the forced stoppage of most of our economic activity last. India has so far been successful in keeping the number of lives lost due to Covid-19 low, but our economy in terms of production, unemployment, income, etc., has suffered a setback, besides the huge outgo on medical infrastructure.

While Covid has not entered into rural India in a big way, the fallout has taken its toll in terms of loss of income flow in general and agricultural income in particular. As the authorities and leaders gather to consider the next steps, we cannot forget that the costs have, in the immediate, been borne by the weakest sections of our society.

A large number of migrant workers are from rural areas. Some of them work on a monthly basis but a large number of them work on a daily-wage basis as construction workers, footpath vendors, washer-men, plumbers, carpenters, auto-rickshaw drivers, and so on. In the case of salary earners, it is expected that for a short period of the lockdown their employers may give salaries for not attending work, but daily bread earners are without any income in urban areas.

The administration is doing its best to provide them food but reaching out to them is a difficult and costly proposition. This has caused anxiety among them. In order to manage within limited resources, they usually stay in shared accommodations. The lockdown has made their shared accommodation a crowded place as some of them are using this on shift basis.

This has caused the migrants a lot of mental stress besides higher risk of contagious disease. This apart, their emotional attachment back home has aggravated the stress and increased the risks of a severe breakdown on all fronts — economic, family, moral, mental and physical.

The exact number of migrant wage labourers is not known but it is estimated that the teeming millions of rural workers are working in various unorganised sectors. A large majority of them belong to rural areas of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Odisha.

Rural woes

Back home, their family members are suffering from a number of problems due to the lockdown, and important among these include:

Migration of agricultural labourers to their native places making harvesting of rabi crop a costly proposition due to non-availability of local labour and rise of wage rates.

Fall in demand for food commodities in general and no-vegetarian food items like eggs, chicken, and meat in particular. This fall in demand has resulted in consequent decline in prices of these commodities.

Higher transportation cost of vegetables and fruits has also impaired viability.

Weekly holiday in milk collection by dairy cooperatives has added fuel to fire.

In short, agricultural income has been reduced dramatically. On the top of all, the fall in urban remittances due to lockdown by causing displacement of migrant workers is a big blow to rural India. In the absence of proper transportation and marketing facilities, the prices of other agricultural commodities in rural areas are highly depressed.

In this backdrop, it should not be surprising even if we end the year with negative agricultural income. Extension of the lockdown up to May 3 has caused restlessness among rural masses in general and stranded migrant workers in urban areas in particular.

The RBI should not shy away from stipulating time-bound targets to enlarge credit flow

At the same time, the importance of the lockdown can’t be gainsaid. Undoubtedly, life is more important than money. However, the needy sections like migrant workers,daily bread earners, agricultural labourers, and tenant farmers should be given relief on a war footing.

Steps to be taken

In this context, the following measures are required with a sense of urgency. Extending the lockdown without taking these steps will lead to unmitigated disaster.

Arrangements should be made in each city to identify migrant workers anxious to return home. A district-wise list will help in making necessary arrangements to take them back home by rail or road. In this context, the Home Ministry recently instructed repatriation of migrant workers to their native homes, which should be undertaken on a war footing.

Therefore, the State governments concerned should monitor their safe return and, if required, the services of the Army should also be used to expedite their return. But once back home, they should be kept in quarantine as per the rules. Needless to say, the return of migrant workers will augment supply of labour at the village level to take up late harvesting and threshing operations of current rabi crops and preparing for the ensuing kharif season.

It goes without saying that as taking migrant workers back home enhances the risk of transmitting Covid in rural areas, we need to develop necessary medical infrastructure at district levels to manage the contingency of this sort.

Additional budgetary provisions are needed under MGNREGA to accommodate these additional migrant workers. Projects benefiting the community at large like watershed solar power lift irrigation should be taken up under this programme on private lands as well.

With a view to ensuring social distancing (better to call it physical distancing) and removing other bottlenecks in marketing of crops, arrangements may be made at the village level to purchase farm produce along the Amul pattern. Incidentally, the recent guidelines issued in the wake of Covid-19 are quite encouraging and may go a long way in increasing agricultural production but not sufficient to ensure increase in agricultural income.

Additional budgetary provisions are needed under MGNREGA to accommodate these additional migrant workers

Kudos to the RBI for announcing adequate refinance assistance to NABARD, SIDBI and NHB to enable commercial banks to augment financial assistance to rural masses However, the ball is now in commercial banks’ court. In this context, the RBI should not shy away from stipulating time-bound targets to enlarge credit flow.

And last, but not the least, Covid is a medical emergency that requires higher doses of nutritional intake, especially by farmers .

This is a complex issue and the government will have to apply its mind to deliver on this. In its absence, we will be incapacitating the lifeblood of our economy — the workers who build, and sow and reap — and that will put India in a downward spiral from which it will be difficult to come out soon.

(Dadhich is Editor of the ‘Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics’ and Honorary Secretary of the Indian Society of Agricultural Economics, where Vijaya Venkatesh is Director of Research)