A peculiar aspect of our governance lately has been to set up committees on issues of grave importance. In complex issues, there is actually no harm in getting a group of knowledgeable people to study the details. But when you have very experienced people running the show, the issues have already been studied and the choices are clear, there emerges a reasonable suspicion that sometimes committees are just a way of ?filibustering?. You remember, in the American Senate, you can speak for as long as you want, and filibustering was coined as an expression when some worthy members started reading the pages of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica to delay some legislation or voting.
Is India going the same way? When actual action is wanted, as in the Indo-US nuclear deal, the Indian government comes across as being very focused, but on many other issues, we get committees instead.
The tool of choice of a group of ministers (GoM). So, we have a GoM on fertiliser policy reform. Every few weeks, we get gems?such as nutrient-based pricing being seriously considered. Now the National Commission on Farmers has said this. I am told Abhijit Sen also said it. A committee I chaired also said it a couple of years ago, but I knew it was not easy. The subsidy on nitrogen is high and my recommendation was that if the terms of trade move in favour of the agriculturalist, prices could be raised to that extent, and I knew it was not going to be accepted. The problem in nutrient-based pricing is that the nitrogen subsidy is high, and you can?t reduce it. Also, you don?t have the money to raise subsidy on potash. Now, this is known, and GoMs are not needed to tie themselves in knots over it. As Shah Rukh Khan says, ?Do it?, or keep quiet. Talking of policies you are not going to implement creates uncertainties with high costs.
Fertiliser consumption has started growing again after a decade-and-a-half. It used to grow by 10% annually, then went down to less than 4% for almost 15 years, and is now rising at a respectable 6% rate. Uncertainty makes the trade, the consumer and producer nervous. Imports are at high cost, anyway, and are highly subsidised. The government has been talking of a policy for domestic capacity expansion along import parity principles enunciated by some of us (another committee?), but has done nothing.
The more expensive imports become, and the larger the difference with the weighted average domestic price, the shriller become the thinktanks on subsidies to factories and not the farmer. A particular agency which specialises in the subject of Indian policy taxing the farmer, has, after causing damage for over two decades now, admitted that its calculations were wrong, but has not given up on the fertiliser variant of the argument. Maybe they will recant later at some appropriate moment.
Another gem is the question of a direct subsidy to the farmer. The NSSO can quietly publish that two-thirds of India?s farmers don?t have anything to do with a bank, although by now, more cards have been issued than kisans at many places. Some 40% of the country?s farming households don?t have title to the land they till. But we will give fertiliser directly to the man no one has touched before and we don?t even call him a tenant. Come on, let?s face it. The smart cards will go to the smart ones, and the kisan will remain high and dry. Having gone into this, we suggested that it could be tried out as an experiment by the Co-operative Fertiliser factories, which are the most efficient in the industry and have the requisite links with farmers as well. So, they said, instead of a limited number of experimental districts where the co-ops were willing to take responsibility, they would do it experimentally in every state. Ho-hum. But we could rope in some of the better-run private factories, with farmer clubs, and get going. But now, the smarter ones have taken over. Nothing is happening, but confusion abounds. When you go to a village and the kabirwadas, the poor tenant kisan asks, ?Saheb, will my khad go to the babu saheb (landlord)??
To be sure, a new committee will look into the proposals of the National Farmer Commission on food security. Meanwhile, the Indian grain farmer is walloped by the highest in the land turning down the proposal that the Indian farmer can compete with the foreign farmer who will supply wheat at around Rs 14 a kilo and will be subsidised by our reformist government. The subsidy will neutralise around a tenth of the money spent on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). So it goes, with one committee after another, some empowered, some not, all part of the huge apparatus of governance in this vast country.
It?s a Kafkaesque world, is it not?
?The author is a former Union minister for power, planning and science, and was vice-chancellor of JNU.
Email: alagh@icenet.net