Food policy pundits, are busy these days, telling everyone that the solution to Indian farmer suicides, lies not in financial imprudence, a.k.a., farmer loans write off, but, in the farmers being persuaded to embrace contract farming, as the essential basic producers, who will somehow, fit into, the retail and corporate sector strategies, of food, "from the farm to the fork". They say, the Indian government should continue on the strategy, of subsidizing corporate and industrial infrastructure, and drop the policy of Indira Gandhi, that underlay the Green Revolution and the motive of food self sufficiency, that underpinned it.
Commodities futures trading, crop diversifications, horticulture, cut flowers for European markets, organic nomenclature, rural food processing units, you name it, they have enough solutions to how the farmer can save his body, even if he has to sell off his soul to the devil.
Of course, it is the same farm pundits, who can not tell the difference between one weed growing on a plot of land from another, or will entertain the idea, of forced farm conscription for their own children. Nor do they have any answers, why wheat is being imported from global markets at much higher prices, while the dumb Indian farmer is told, that he must attend kisan chaupals, to learn how to protect his crop from pests, and help in the dismantling of the food storage godowns of FCI.
The same farm pundits, are hoping that somehow, the lack of options, that the Indian farmer has from his own government, will effectively seal him and sandwich him, into accepting the role of "contracted producer" in the new regime, of food super markets and convenience shopping retail chains, for an urban, and maybe urbane, middle class.
A band of contract farming management experts, is taking shape, again, manned by the people, who will scoff at the very idea, of their own children being forced to till the land, even if only for purely academic purposes, and make a living from farming in the modern India.
Farming by conscription, is of course, unthinkable in democratic India for the children of the urban and urbane, farm pundits. But somehow, farmers are essentially doing that. In return, they get the sheer luxury of voting for either Ajit Singh, Mayawati or Mulayam Singh, once every five years, and derogatory labels like kulaks and illiterate peasants.
Tikait and the tractors of the Jat kulaks crowding the spick and span RajPath is a detestable sight of course for these concerned "friends of farmers".
Join the band wagon of sewing fantastic invisible clothes, for the naked emperor.