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 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.