Lohri, Pongal, Sankranti, Bihu… Some More Reasons We Should Be Grateful To Farmers

Farmers protesting the implementation of the 3 farmers bills are protesting the meddling by corporates that will happen, and destroy Indian agriculture as we know it.

13th & 14th of January is the day Lohri, Makkar Sankranti, Pongal and Bihu, the harvest festivals, are celebrated in most parts India to express gratitude to the land and its tillers, the farmers, for coaxing it to yield to their touch of knowledge, love and affection.

Bounties of nature, we call the output, bounties of nature. Comes from nature, but after a lot of hard work and effort.

I am told that like the CAA laws have been stayed and will be used to put the fear of domicile rights in the minorities but not fully implemented. And perhaps the same will hold for the farm bills.

The difference between the farm bills and the CAA bills is this.

The non implementation of the CAA will not hurt anyone, we all will welcome them being consigned to dust and dirt.

An economy going bust, buoyed by agriculture

The non-implementation of the farm bills will hurt the corporate sector and cronies very badly indeed. In spite of the stock market reaching a ridiculous number of 49k, we all know that the economy is going bust. Government finances have taken a major hit; the ill-effects of demonetization have left a trail of financial devastation and the GST collections, in spite of all efforts have not buoyed as much as needed to pull the economy out of the doldrums. Private investment has fallen, government investment has shrunk, the industrial sector is struggling and the services sector has not fully opened up post-Covid.

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The economic growth witnessed during the lockdown came from the agricultural sector. The government was the first to accept it and even take credit for it. The growth in the primary sector kept us from going further down the steep decline and arrested our growth rate at about -24.5%. (Underreported, but still).

Corporates moving in for the kill with govt

The corporates have understood that the next growth in India will come from land, not oil and coal from deep under the ground, but from the topsoil, agriculture.

India’s population is going to be 1.7 billion in another 20 years, someone has to feed it and someone also has to profit from it.

The systems they have built are not for the short run. They are long term investments, ironically funded by us, from our deposits in the nationalized banks. They take loans, return the loans for a certified period so as to not invite any recovery, etc, and then stop repaying them and the banks quietly write off the rest as NPA’s. That is our money.

The non-implementation of the farm bills will hurt the cronies who have invested in the agricultural sector, unlike the non-implementation of the CAA which will be welcomed by all.

And since there is a ‘reverse hold my back’ between the cronies and the government, these bills are being pushed without a care for the farmers or the common man.

The farm laws will create foodgrain led inflation, landbanks for corporate takeover, rural unemployment, urban-rural wage vector collapse…

And once the issue of the farm bills is settled, it is highly likely that the CAA bill and issues will resurface.

And once the dust settles, the stay on the farm bills will be vacated.

I can add more data and numbers to this; if you understand the issues, all else will fall in place. Everything here can be verified by doing a simple google search.

Please support the demand of the farm sector. The laws have to be repealed.

Image source: By Randeep Maddoke; [email protected] – Provided by eMail from Randeep Maddoke, CC0, Link and By Felton Davis – 053 Indian Farmers Protest, CC BY 2.0, Link

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