Story of an unprotected yet empowered farmer

Indian government recently passed few ordinances/laws under the banner of 'The Farmers Empowerment and Protection Ordinance'

One of my great teachers, late Sajjan Singh used to say, “To understand the true meaning of any legislation, you should reverse the key words of the ordinance”,

Going by that understanding, it seems to me that, either this law takes the Empowerment and Protection of a farmer away or it empowers and protects someone, who is not a farmer.

I also learned from the same teacher that a government or a parliament cannot and does not produce a single loaf of bread. Each and every ordinance or bill that passes through the Parliament can merely transfer the fruits of the labour of A to the lap of B; it always favors one select group or class of people, known as insider or ruling class, at the cost of and to the disadvantage of others.

Some of my friends are in favour of these new laws whilst others are against them and yet some others are silent or confused. To understand these ordinances, we must tackle series of questions;

Whom does it benefit? Who asked for this protection in the first place?

So far, I am unable to find a single person who initiated this request through his representative Member of Parliament. In fact my brief enquiry revealed that almost all MPs of ruling party were unaware of the contents of the bills. They just got a briefing to say “Yeh-Yeh” to get the bills passed by voice vote.

Now let us examine the key part of the actual ordinances, to see whether my teacher was really great or not.

First major goal of the farmers’ empowerment law is to allow them to market their produce anywhere in India. This sounds like a very fair and progressive idea, isn’t it? Out of curiosity to test the hypothesis on the ground, I went to see my childhood friend Iqbal, who is a small farmer with land holding of 4 acres. This year he is having a bumper crop of sugar cane, ready to go hit the market. He was very excited about this new law; pulls out a mobile phone from his pocket, provided free of charge by his state government and searches online farm produce spot market rates. Wow! He can get Rs. 2000 per tonne extra, provided he drives from Amritsar to Calcutta, some 1966 Kms. Iqbal checks the cost of hiring a truck for transportation, albeit he doesn’t have that much money on hand. Farmers never do. He then calculates the cost of fuel if he borrows a trailer and tows with his tractor. Lakho, his farm hand will have to accompany him on this tour-de-India, after all they have to take toilet breaks and sleep in turns to guard the trailer of canes loaded with sugar.

 

Iqbal has already given some thoughts about taking some home distilled bottles along but that may not be protected as a farm produce under the new law. Surely they will need to buy some food on their round trip of 10-15 days. He didn’t add any cost of motel accommodation as they will be sleeping on trailer top. He is so excited about this newly gained protection and empowerment that he is not even bothered by various state police check points and number of traffic laws that he might be inadvertently infringing. His level of confidence dropped when Lakho asked Iqbal to find out what are the prevailing Police Naka (check-post) rates in various jurisdictions on their way. They found several posts by others but the information was not conclusive, Naka rates varied from Rs. 25 to Rs. 500 based on the rank of the officer in charge, time of the day and day of the month. In spite of being very good in maths, Iqbal was unable to calculate the total expedition cost with this unknown factor.  Some other thoughts started creeping in his mind, what if the tractor breaks down on the highway, what if the market rate drops when they reach Calcutta, what if one of them falls sick….and on top of all this, who will look after the cows and irrigate and cultivate the fields…sowing of next crop may get delayed. This was too much of a risk to take. He quits the expedition, with the help of Lakho, sets up the old Velna and Karaha ਵੇਲਣਾ ਤੇ ਕੜਾਹਾ (apparatus to make Gur) and takes the copy of the newspaper that published the Farmers Protection and Empowerment Act, starts up the fire under the ਕੜਾਹਾ.

Iqbal decides not to sell his sugar cane crop again, just barter the Gur with whatever he needs to buy from the shops. No protection needed.