7/28/2019 For Big Business

1/3june 1, 2013 vol xlviII no 22 EPW Economic & Political Weekly4

LETTERS

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Editor: C Rammanohar Reddy.

Issn 0012-9976

For Big Business

The editorial Desperate for Justice(EPW, 25 May 2013) reveals the in-fringement and violation of human rights

of the workers of Marutis Manesar plant.

The police and administration are actingat the behest of the Maruti companys

management and in any case, this govern-

ment is working mostly in the interests

of multinationals and foreign powers.

Sometimes, I doubt that we are living

in a sovereign state. Your editorial rightly

says It has been clear from the early days

of the workers struggle that the Congress-

led Haryana government and the United

Progressive Alliance government at the

centre are determined to do everything to

assuage big business sentiments, even if

it requires the small matter of denying

thousands of Indian citizens their funda-

mental rights. The government must

take suitable action to ensure justice to

the employees of the Maruti plant. The

welfare of citizens is more important

than any narrow business interest.

Saroj Upadhyay

Kolkata

Incorrect Information

The article Land Acquisition and Com-pensation: What Really Happenedin Singur? by Ghatak et al (EPW, 25 May

2013) is an elaborate work full of data

and calculations. However, the description

of the project-affected villages in the pa-

per reflects the authors lack of adequate

and correct knowledge/information.

First, under the heading Singur Epi-

sode: A Short Summary, the authors have

asserted that the area acquired in Singur

is about 90 km from Kolkata. The distance

between Singur and Kolkata is hardly

more than 40 km. Second, under the head-

ing Survey Design and Data the authors

have claimed that the survey has been

conducted in 12 villages in Singur Census

Town. Singur Census Town is a small

entity of Singur C D Block. All six sample

project-affected villages are located out-

side the Singur Census Town. The authors

should have consulted concerned blockdevelopment office to authenticate the

information before making it public. The

villages Beraberi and Joymolla are suc-

cessively seven and eight km away from

this town. Third, land has also been ac-

quired from the revenue village Babur

Bheri which has been missed out and in its

place, Joymolla has been put in. Joymolla

is a non-revenue village under Beraberirevenue village. If non-revenue villages are

considered, at least 15 more villages will

enter the scene as villages that have lost

land. Only one out of six sample unaffected

villages drawn for the study is adjacent to

the project-affected villages, i e, Jompukur,

located to the west of Beraberi revenue

village. The rest are not adjacent. The

sample unaffected villages Ghanshyampur,

Raghunathpur, Simulpukur, Bahrampur

are several kilometres away from the

project-affected villages.

Fertility of the agricultural land in

these four villages is much better than the

land acquired for Tata Motors. Therefore,

the proposition of similarity between

the two sets of sample, as claimed by the

authors on page 34, is negated. There are

11 revenue villages (other than Jompukur)

surrounding the project-affected revenue

villages. Nonetheless, they are not drawn

as sample unaffected villages, which in-

deed raises questions about the methodo-logical accuracy for selecting unaffected

villages. The result of a field-survey based

research paper largely depends upon the

selection of samples. Fourth, the authors

argue that unregistered sharecroppers

of the acquired land received more than

50%. I would argue that they are incorrect.

There are two ways of sharing crop pro-

duce in project-affected villages: if the

owners of the land contribute half of the

total input cost (except family labour of

the tenants) for crop cultivation, the

output will be divided into two equal

halves; otherwise the tenants retain 75%.

Animesh Roy

Centre for the Study of Regional Development,

Jawaharlal Nehru University,

New Delhi

NABARDs Self-help

The road to hell is paved with good

intentions! In the union budget for2013-14, a sum of Rs 5,000 crore has been

earmarked for financing construction of

7/28/2019 For Big Business

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Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 1, 2013 vol xlviII no 22 5

LETTERS

Web Exclusives

The following articles have been uploaded in the past week in the Web Exclusives section ofthe EPW website. They have not been published in the print edition.

Read them at http://epw.in

(1) Are Our Regulators Imaginative? D N Ghosh

(2) IPL: As Skewed as the System Sidharth Bhatia

(3) Liberal Education: The Road Not Taken Gautam Bhan

(4) Delhi Universitys Undergraduate Programme: Notes from the Archives Neeti Nair

Articles posted before 18 May 2013 remain available in the Web Exclusives section.

countries, farmers get 70% of the value

of their produce, with 30% going to the

traders. In India, traders manage to get

at least 70% of the value of farm produce

while farmers are hard-pressed to retain

even 30% of their produce value. With

inadequate farm credit availability (despite

a farm credit flow of Rs 6 lakh crore in2012-13) for the smallholder farmers, they

are forced to sell their produce during

harvest seasons when ruling mandi prices

are at an all-time low (also due to prevail-

ing Agricultural Produce Market Commit-

tee restrictions). All these factors force

the farmer to sell at the lowest prices

dictated by the traders. The smallholder

farmer has no warehousing or financial

capacity to retain his produce for two to

three months and secure favourable prices

as he has to pay off the high interest rate

loans (minimum rate of interest is 5%

per month as per risk perceptions) from

shopkeepers, agents and moneylenders.

NABARD could have prepared schemes

for smallholder farmers/cooperatives/

panchayats to build community-owned

warehouses or repaired/renovated exist-

ing National Cooperative Development

Council warehouses for cooperatives. Its

recent initiatives have been on traders

and corporates building warehouses andoperating them purely for profit. These

schemes benefit the retail traders and

MNCs which are all set to make a killing

in rural India. Instead of benefiting

smallholder farmers, this bonanza of

Rs 5,000 crore will boost the profits of a

few MNCs and a few select corporate

houses only. The smallholder farmers

will be left in the lurch as the terms of

trade continue to remain adverse for

them. If smaller cooperative/community-

based warehouses were built and oper-

ated, smallholder farmers would have

benefited but, alas, today in NABARDs

corridors of power, corporate houses

Corrigendum

In the article The Near and the Far: Why Is

Indias Liberal-Political Democracy Rotten?

by Bernard DMello, in this issue on page 36,

second column, para 3, the first sentence

should read as: One can begin from 20

years ago when Indias elite embraced neo-

liberalism,.... On page 45, column 1, para 2,

second-last sentence should read as: Insti-

tutions and circumstances, given and trans-

mitted from the past, do matter a great deal

in how the fat cats who are presently making

their own history actually do so that the big

decisions a financial aristocrat or business ty-coon takes are inextricably connected with

the fate of tens of thousands of poor people

whose very existence he seems to deny.

The corrected version is on the EPWwebsite.

warehouses/godowns/silos/cold storages

designed to store agricultural produce

both in the public and the private sectors.

The window will also finance through

the state governments, construction of

godowns by panchayats to enable farmers

to store their produce.

While the central government hasclearly signalled its desire for adequate

warehousing and space availability for

storing farm produce and reducing wast-

ages by not letting grains rot in open

silos, it appears that the National Bank

for Agriculture and Rural Development

(NABARD) is up to its old tricks and seeking

to divert substantial funds to corporates/

companies and individual traders to build

warehouses. Instead of assisting small-

holder farmers to build smaller ware-

houses or encouraging panchayats to build

community-owned warehouses, NABARD

has turned the scheme on its head and

has approved the allocation of Rs 5,000

crore as under:

(1) State governments and panchayat raj

institutions (PRIs) (as per Rural Infrastruc-

ture Development Fund (RIDF) norms).

(2) Agencies owned/sponsored by state

governments (as per RIDF norms).

(3) Banks/financial institutions (under

the usual Automatic Refinance Facilityscheme ofNABARD).

(4) Direct loans to individual entrepre-

neurs, corporates/companies, etc.

What is truly amazing is that NABARD

has actually approved the apportionment

of Rs 5,000 crore without batting an

eyelid as there is no mention that these

warehouses are exclusively for agricultural

produce and not for the multinational

corporations (MNCs) for their retail trade

foray into rural and urban India. NABARD

should have ensured this critical opera-

tional part. Nor has it restricted these

godowns to rural areas so as to protect

the interests of smallholder farmers. All

that remains is for NABARD to ensure

that direct loans to big traders, corpo-

rates and companies predominate and

the loot continues.

At a time when smallholder farmers

are resorting to suicide, especially after

the 1992 liberalised economic policies,

NABARD should have framed this ware-housing opportunity of Rs 5,000 crore

to assist smallholder farmers. In most

and power-brokers rule the roost and

the noose tightens around the necks of

smallholder farmers. Another fiction about

RIDF loans is that PRIs are theoretically

enabled to borrow from RIDF. In 18 com-

pleted annual tranches ofRIDF, how many

PRIs have managed to secure loans from

NABARD? Not a single loan and the fictioncontinues to be perpetuated byNABARD.

Another interesting development is that

the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has taken

a tough stance on the refund of RIDF

deposits drawn under RIDFXVII to banks

and the NABARD Board of Directors cleared

the proposal on 8 February 2013. But the

amount of Rs 759 crore was refunded to

RBI only on 8 April 2013 and thereby

hangs a tale! This delay of two months

was only to ensure window-dressing of

NABARDs balance sheet as the return of

Rs 759 crore would have affected the

balance sheet adversely.

NABARDs self-help principles are for

personal benefits and not for the poorer

sections of people whose interests should

have remained uppermost while design-

ing NABARDs policies.

K G Karmakar

Mumbai

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LETTERS

june 1, 2013 vol xlviII no 22 EPW Economic & Political Weekly6

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