Revitalization of Rivers in India Draft Policy - Isha Guru Jaggi Vasudev

Revitalization of Rivers In India
Draft Policy Recommendation
PLIGHT OF FARMERS IN INDIA
While we as a nation have been clocking decent growth rates, this
is hardly reflected in the wellbeing of our farmers. The farmers who have
put food on the plates of 1.3 billion people do not have enough to feed
their own families. Every year thousands of Indian farmers end their own
lives, and shocking as this is, it has become routine, regular news to us.
Around 3 lakh farmers have committed suicide in this country in the last
2 decades. 10 Even wars do not result in so many deaths. Have we become
so insensitive that we do not care about the people to whom we owe our
well-being and our very life?
Farmers in India are classified as marginal, small, semi-medium,
medium and large, based on their land holding size. Small and marginal
farmers together make 85 per cent of the farming population in India. 11
This set of farmers make up around 70 percent of the total debts incurred
by farmers. 12 The amount they borrow ranges from a mere Rs. 23,900 to
35,400. And 72 percent of total farmer suicides are from this group. 13
The impoverished state of the majority of the farmer community
can be attributed to many reasons. The agro-forestry in farm land,
although proposed as a solution proposed to river revitalization, attempts
to address these reasons which present various livelihood pressures for
farmers in the target areas.
In this section we try to articulate the fundamental technical and
economic reasons due to which the farming community is in its present
state of crisis. Without understanding these issues, there is a high
likelihood that this project of revitalizing rivers will not benefit farmers.
And so the techno-economic model of agro-forestry based farming needs
to address the issues that farmers face.
Let us look at the farming activity as a manufacturing enterprise that
produces agro-commodities. There are raw materials that are the input
into the farm, which are then worked on by the farmers, resulting in an
output (good/ produce) which is then sold. The two major inputs involved
in farming are water and soil (which do not have apparent costs). Water
crisis is elaborately discussed throughout this entire book, therefore in
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