Solidarity with Rural India

Friday, September 25, 2009

Solidarity with Rural India

Indian Holocaust My Father`s Life and Time- One Hundred One

Palash Biswas


Many Chief Ministers have started putting pressure on the Centre to resolve the SEZ impasse as global investors have conveyed concern over their investments in India. The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Haryana have written to the members of the empowered Group of Ministers on SEZ conveying concerns of the investors who had lined up big investments in their states. Contaririly, West Bengal Stalinists’ pro-business policies leading to “civil war” and Prominent left-wing intellectuals warn of dire consequenses. Buddhadev is sticking his line of typical Marxist Capitalist line ditto the Chinese one. Left intelligentsia is divided as the Front is.After Singur and Nandigram, the West Bengal government has opened another Pandora's Box with a proposal to build a giant nuclear power station at Haripur in East Medinipur district. The project is a Central government initiative. But it enjoys considerable support from the state's Left Front government, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-CPM). 


Meanwhile , Kolkata resistance turns wider with Intelligentia solidarity expressed in a convention held in University Institute Hall. Along with others , the most prominent dignitary present was Taslima Nasreen. Taslima is a controversial Bangladeshi writer who has been repeatedly asking for Indian citizenship. Others were leftist Historian from delhi Sumit Sarkar, Mahashweta Devi, Shaoli Mitra, aparna Sen, Sunando Sanyal, Bibhas Chakrobarti,Kabeer suman and famous personalities of Kolkata Intelligentsia. Little mags have already declared war. Several of them have Published special issues on Singur and nandigram. The leading on is Bartika, edited by no one less than Mahashweta devi. Jalark has come out with a special issue containing articles published by Desbrati during the days of Thundering spring in seventies which were edited by Susheetal choudhari. If the CPM-led Left Front has been able to form West Bengal’s state government for the past 30 years, it is because it was able to consolidate a strong base of peasant support by implementing comprehensive land reform soon after coming to power. In its initial years in office, the Left Front regime also made various social-democratic type concessions to the organised working class, granting a modicum of job security and other benefits.However, in lock step with the Indian bourgeoisie’s abandonment of its state-led development strategy and turn toward transforming India into a cheap-labor producer for the world capitalist market, the West Bengal government has moved ever rightward for the past 15 years. It now demands that the unions instill discipline so as to boost productivity and seizes land from poor peasants so it can be used for Special Economic Zones where capital will enjoy all manner of concessions and subsidies and traditional labor standards and rights will, in all likelihood, not apply.
If a prospective investor in the SEZ scheme were to read the Economic Survey tabled in Parliament on Tuesday, he may well shelve all plans of going ahead with such an investment. The government has, while discussing industrial growth, listed out a series of apprehensions against the entire scheme instead of giving any future direction to the ongoing debate over SEZs. So, the SEZ Policy - which has legal guarantee through the SEZ Act - is made out to be an issue, which is still being debated and it looks as if the Government cannot make up its mind on the matter. Sample this: The lengthy list of apprehensions outlined in the Survey includes not only the most sensitive issue of large-scale land acquisition by developers which may lead to displacement of farmers with meagre compensation but also talks about revenue loss due to relocation of industry away from tax-savings havens. 

The Centre noted that acquisition of prime agricultural land could have serious implications for food security; developers could misuse land and the overall SEZ activity could lead to uneven growth and aggravated regional inequalities.On the issue of concerns over acquisition of agricultural land, the Survey points out that state governments have been advised that the “first priority should be for acquisition of water and barren land and if necessary, single crop agricultural land could be acquired if perforce a portion of double cropped agricultural land has to be acquired to meet minimum area requirements, it should not exceed 10% of the total land acquired for that SEZ”.

But despite the prevailing uncertainty over the fate of SEZs, they appear to be attracting adequate investments. Investments to the tune of Rs 3,163 crore have been made by entrepreneurs for establishing units in these SEZs and as many as 1,016 units are in operation within these zones, providing direct employment to over 1.79 lakh people. 

And after the SEZ Act and SEZ rules came into effect, formal approval has so far been granted to 237 SEZ proposals and in-principle approval has been given to 164 more proposals. If all the 237 SEZs become operational, investment to the tune of Rs three lakh crore may come in, with creation of four million additional jobs. 


Already the Left Front government has declared information-technology and IT-enabled industries a public utility, a designation which greatly restricts workers rights, including the right to strike.

But the mainstream media is supporting Bhattacharya and the SEZ drive. Ananda Bazar Patrika published the lead story on Union Budget with a screaming headline, SUJOG PEYEO RUN NAY.Opportunity Missed , No Run. The leading paper fails to distiguish between a serious issue like union budget and Indian Cricket. No, it delibrately diverts the Resistance. The media led by ABP vehemently criticises P CHidambaram for his budgetary outlays on Agro and Socail sectors. He did not speak a single word about about economic refoms.

On the other hand, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee turned 64 today.The CM was greeted with flowers by his well-wishers. However, Bhattacharjee missed his one-time colleague in the CPI(M) - late Anil Biswas, who would also have turned 64 today.Biswas, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member and party's State Secretary, who died last year, shared his birthday with Bhattacharjee this day. 

"It is painful as the day reminds me of many old memories in the absence of Anil who was also born the same day. I rang up his wife in the morning", Bhattacharjee said. 

Buddhadev misses much late Biswas as he was known for his expertise to tackle complex problems. It was Biswas who masterminded the change of mask for the ruling Left front replacing Jyoti Basu with Buddhadev.


A group of prominent left-wing intellectuals, several of them long-publicly identified as supporters of the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPM], has issued a report strongly condemning the West Bengal Left Front’s policy of expropriating poor peasants so as to create investor-friendly Special Economic Zones (SEZs).Based on a fact-finding mission that the intellectuals undertook to Nandigram and Singur, the prospective sites respectively of a massive Salim Group industrial complex and a Tata car-assembly plant, the report refutes CPM claims that the popular opposition to its “industrialisation” policy is a provocation mounted by right-wingers and Naxhalites (Maoists).

The CPM is acutely aware that opposition to the practice of seizing large tracts of valuable agricultural land for SEZs is mounting across India. At the same time its attempts to convince investors that the government will make the state “business friendly” very much ride on its capacity to expropriate land.
CPM central committee member Benoy Konar, who is in charge of the land acquisition process, declared, “I can’t do anything if the historians decide to go back in time. A factory, whether in a socialist or a capitalist model, needs land.” West Bengal Commerce and Industry Minister Nirupam Sen sounded the same note saying, “If we were to agree to the historians’ views, no one would be able to acquire land anywhere in India.”Other CPM leaders have claimed that their critics are “victims” of false propaganda and misinformation, prompting Arundhati Roy to declare, “I don’t think I am so stupid. I am not a puppet. I don’t think people like Sumit Sarkar are victims of any propaganda,”

Fearing that the peasant protests and the criticism of intellectuals will find an echo in their own ranks, the CPM leadership has let it be known that party members who criticise the West Bengal government’s “industrialisation policy” will face serious consequences.


The clash at Nandigram threw West Bengal’s CPM-led Left Front government into crisis. After first claiming that no government order had been issued to begin the expropriation process, West Bengal Chief Minister and CPM Politburo Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was forced to concede that government authorities had in fact begun to identify land for seizure and that “mistakes” had been made.This admission has not, however, stopped the Stalinists from mounting a propaganda offensive aimed at depicting peasants opposed to its land seizure program as the dupes of “outside” agitators from the Trinumal Congress, a right-wing breakaway from the Congress party and an ally of the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and various Naxhalite groups.Wanting to uncover the truth, Sumit Sarkar, Supreme Court lawyer Colin Gonsalves, journalist Sumit Chakravarty, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) professor Tanika Sarkar and Krishna Majumdar of Delhi University (DU) undertook a “fact-finding” visit of Nandigram and Singur.

Their interim report puts the lie to the CPM’s claims, while warning that the West Bengal government’s drive to hand over large swathes of land to big business, for a nominal fee and without proper consultation and compensation, threatens to provoke “rural civil war.”

Sumit Sarkar described the gratuitous brutality meted out to the villagers. “We met many people—men and also a large number of women—who had been beaten up, their injuries still visible, including an 80-year-old woman. What the villagers repeatedly alleged was that along with the police, and it seems more than the police, party activists, whom the villagers call ‘cadres’—which has sadly become a term of abuse—did the major part of the beating up.”

Continued Sarkar, “The West Bengal government seems determined to follow a particular path of development involving major concessions both to big capitalists like the Tatas and multinationals operating in SEZs.”

Dr. Tanika Sarkar observed that peasants were, with good reason, not ready to put their faith in government claims that they will benefit from the cushy deals the state government has negotiated with Indian and foreign investors to woo them to West Bengal: “People are totally skeptical about industries providing uneducated people like them with jobs. Moreover, several other such projects at Haldia and Jellingham [dock and container complex] have failed to do anything for displaced people.”

Shaken by the trenchant criticisms made by intellectuals who for the most part have long-been publicly identified with the CPM and the Left Front, the Stalinists have responded with lies and distortions.
“This is a genuine and spontaneous people’s movement and people are angry as they were not consulted and the amount of compensation is far below the market rate,” Sumit Sarkar, an internationally renowned historian of modern India, told reporters after his visits to Singur and Nandigram.

In a joint statement, the intellectuals warned that the popular uprising that convulsed Nandigram in early January “is likely to be repeated across the state if the [industrialisation] policy continues to be executed as it has, without consideration for human rights, democratic procedures and livelihoods.”[Emphasis added]

Sarkar, writer-political activist Arundathi Roy, Romila Thapar, an authority on the history of ancient India, and others felt compelled to speak out against the West Bengal government after CPM activists employed lethal violence January 7 in an attempt to suppress peasant opposition in Nandigram, which lies about 60 kilometres north of the state capital Kolkata (Calcutta).


After learning that the government had begun the process of expropriating their land, people from the Nandigram area chased several local CPM officials and cadres from their homes. Seeking revenge, a gang of 200 CPM supporters descended upon the village on the night of January 6-7, while the police, who are under the state government’s authority, withdrew. In the ensuing melee at least six villagers were killed.

The CPM’s use of thug-violence against the peasants of Nandigram had been preceded by the West Bengal government’s invocation of legislation drafted by the British colonial-state to impose a blanket ban on all meetings and protests in Singur and to prohibit people from outside the area traveling to Singur.


On February 11 West Bengal Chief Minister and CPM Politburo Member Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee told a rally organised by the CPM near Nandigram, “The people need to understand that the industrial process being initiated by the state government is irreversible and transition from agriculture to industry is an inevitable course.”

During a visit to Singur he told anti-Tata motors campaigner, “You can’t stop the car factory from coming up this way. The factory will definitely come up, and none can stop it.”

CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat, writing in the CPM weekly People’s Democracy, attempted to answer the charge made by Sarkar and the other left-intellectuals that the CPM engages in “double-speak” when it postures as an opponent as the neo-liberal economic policies being pursued by the Congress-Party led United Progressive Alliance while implementing like policies in West Bengal.

“At the heart of the matter,” writes Karat, “is these critics’ inability to comprehend the role of a state government under India’s constitutional set-up and the CPI(M)’s understanding of what [state] governments headed by the Party can do.

“In the past decade and a half, the all-India policy of the CPI(M) has been to oppose the neo-liberal direction of policies, popularly termed liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. What is not recognised enough is that the state governments have to bear the brunt of such policies.”

According to Karat, because India’s constitution places the principal economic levers in the hands of the central government, West Bengal’s Left Front government is compelled to implement neo-liberal policies, to woo investors by attacking the working class and toilers. “West Bengal,” proclaims Karat, “will have the basic features of a liberalised capitalist economy. Those who believe that it can be otherwise are only deluding themselves.”

Excluded, of course, is any possibility of the CPM challenging India’s reactionary bourgeois constitution or placing the perks and privileges that come from controlling the West Bengal state government at risk.

The truth is that the Stalinists have played the pivotal role in suppressing the mass opposition to the social devastation that has been produced by 15 years of neo-liberal reform.

If the bourgeoisie was able in the early 1990s to so readily effect a fundamental change in its class strategy, extricating itself from the shipwreck of state-led national development and moving to forge a closer alliance with international capital, it was because the Stalinists had for decades made the working class an appendage to one or another capitalist party, on the grounds that the only “realistic” policy was to support the “anti-imperialist” or “anti-feudal wing” of the ruling class, i.e., that most strongly supportive of national development.

Since 1991, the CPM and its Stalinist sister party, the Communist Party of India, have propped up national governments that have pressed forward with neo-liberal reforms, including the current Congress Party-led UPA government, in the name of preventing the BJP from forming the government.

Karat’s frank admission that the CPM-led Left Front is presiding over a neo-liberal West Bengal and the CPM’s use of anti-democratic laws and outright violence to expropriate peasants for capitalist development underscore that this party is a political prop of, and policeman for, the Indian bourgeoisie.


Seal on CM farm theory , A Telegraph Kolkata story\- Economic Survey shows fall in agriculture contribution 
OUR BUREAU 

Mumbai, Feb. 27: Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee believes Bengal should slowly start making the transition from agriculture to industry — and his argument for the shift finds its gravitas in today’s Economic Survey which shows that agriculture’s contribution to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) has dipped further to 18.5 per cent. 

The national economy is growing at 9.2 per cent — one of its fastest growth rates in the past decade. Industry has started to boom and has attained double digit growth at 10 per cent. Just five years ago, industrial growth had plunged to one of its lowest levels at 2.7 per cent. 

The economy rests on three pillars: services, industry and agriculture. 

Both services and industry are maintaining robust growth this year but agriculture is clearly flagging. “While the share of agriculture in GDP declined to 18.5 per cent, the share of industry and services improved to 26.4 per cent and 55.1 per cent, respectively,” says the Economic Survey. 

What is the upshot of this? There is a real danger that the country could start seeing the emergence of two sharply distinct entities: India A and India B. The first is urban centric and dependent on industry and services, and the second is the more sluggish rural India — dependent entirely on agriculture — where the benefits of growth in India A seep very slowly, if at all. 

The government realises this only too well and that is why the survey stresses the need to ensure “the inclusive nature of such high growth”. It adds: “Putting more people in productive and sustainable jobs lies at the heart of inclusive growth…. There cannot be inclusive growth without growth itself.” 


The tripwire to growth is inflation which has been rising sharply this year. The survey says the government was taking steps to moderate inflation. 

But it indicated that it would need to perform a balancing act: “The fight against inflation has to be calibrated so that policies contain inflation without compromising growth.” 

The Economic Survey says: “Services contributed as much as 68.6 per cent of the overall average growth in GDP in the last five years between 2002-03 and 2006-07. Practically, the entire residual contribution came from industry.” 

And that means that agriculture isn’t pulling its weight. “After an annual average of 3.0 per cent in the first five years of the new millennium starting 2001-02, growth of agriculture at only 2.7 per cent in 2006-07, on a base of 6.0 per cent growth in the previous year, is a cause of concern,” says the survey. 

Bhattacharjee has already read the situation and believes that Bengal — which he reckons is in a transition phase — needs to slowly shift from agriculture to industry (see interview in Bengal Unbound). Bengal is still a largely farm-dependent economy with as much as 63 per cent of the land available in the state earmarked for agriculture. 

Agriculture still contributes more than industry to the state’s domestic product at 26 per cent against 24 per cent by industry. Bhattacharjee wants to change that by earmarking more land for industry so that the people of the state can get more jobs and derive the benefits of growth. 

The chief minister intends to change that if he can. The Economic Survey buttresses Bhattacharjee’s argument but will his detractors listen?

Times have indeed changed for the Indian Marxists and who understands it better than Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. In a note sent to Left Front constituents CPI, RSP and the Forward Bloc on Tuesday, the chief minister has said in no uncertain terms that though as a Marxist he believed that “capitalists always exploit,” there was now no other alternative but to give them a red carpet welcome to Bengal.

The Marxists in Bengal and the capitalist – a dirty word for the Left till recently – have a mutual interest, Buddhadeb has argued in his note aimed at silencing the CPI, RSP and the Forward Bloc, who have criticized him saying that during his regime, “the capitalists are jumping over Bengal to exploit it.”

“The fact is in fact just the opposite. We are running after the capitalists. There is stiff competition among states to obtain investment. Riots take place in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. Yet it attracts investment. How can we sit idle?” he wondered in his note.


The public knows very little about the Haripur project except that it's likely to consist of six reactors of 1,690 megawatts each, a size three times bigger than the largest reactor the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has built (540 MW). Together, they will generate 10,000 MW in a single location-contrasting sharply with India's current nuclear capacity of 3,900 MW spread over 6 sites. Yet, such is the opacity surrounding Haripur that it hasn't even been discussed in the state Cabinet. There is no clarity about which agency will build it and with what resources. Opacity is itself a strong enough reason to oppose the Haripur project. But as we see below, even stronger ecological, economic, social and political arguments exist for scrapping it altogether at today's early stage.

The Left Front should seize the initiative to do so for the same reasons that the Left parties in the 1990s opposed a nuclear power plant at Peringom in Kerala's Kannur district-namely, that nuclear power is inappropriate especially in a densely populated region. And deltaic Bengal is even more densely inhabited than Kerala. Haripur happens to be in a cyclone-prone area. This further strengthens the argument. 

Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has coined a new slogan, "Agriculture - our foundation; Industry - our future", which is painted all over Kolkata to stress the view that large-scale industry alone can develop Bengal, generate jobs and raise incomes across-the-board. Mr Bhattacharjee is backing Haripur on the assumption that the key to Bengal's industrialisation lies in nuclear power, an abundant, safe, environmental benign and economically competitive energy source, which is rapidly growing the world over, and emerging as a solution to the grave problem of global warming caused by fossil-fuel burning. 

MIRED

This assumption is comprehensively wrong. It's mired in naïve, outdated but techno-romantic "Atoms for Peace" thinking of the early 1950s. Despite huge subsidies by the state, nuclear power has betrayed its early promise and turned out unaffordably expensive, difficult to manage, unacceptably unsafe, accident-prone, and environmentally unsound. Today, the fixed capital costs of nuclear power stations in most countries are 50 to 70 percent higher than those of coal- and oil-fired electricity plants. These are translated into higher unit costs of energy. Investing in nuclear power is doubly unwise because that detracts from developing renewable energy, some of which (e.g. wind) has already become commercially competitive. 

The history of nuclear power is a story, according to energy consultant Amory Lovins, of the greatest failure in the world's industrial history. It's also a story of euphoric projections and repeatedly missed targets. Thus, had the nuclear industry's 25 year-old projections materialised, the globe would have had 10 times more nuclear electricity than it has. India is a prime example of this failure. We're still well under half of the target (10,000 MW) set for 1980!

Nuclear power contributes 16 percent to global electricity generation-and an even more modest 6 percent to energy consumption. This contribution will shrink rapidly in the coming decade and more. In place of the 114 reactors (of a world total of 435) that will be retired in a decade from now on reaching the age of 40 years, only 29 new ones are under construction, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the body mandated to promote nuclear power. Even if "planned" reactors are added, new capacity won't match the capacity being retired. 

RADIATION HAZARDS

Even The Economist, the conservative pro-nuclear magazine, concedes that most reactors in the rich OECD countries, which account for two-thirds of the world total, will close down. Major countries like Germany, Britain, Italy, Sweden and Belgium are phasing out nuclear power. Even France, the world's most nuclear-powered country, with 79 percent of power drawn from the atom, has shut down 11 reactors and has plans for only one new reactor. This means there's no global nuclear reconnaissance, as romantically predicted. Only a few Asian countries, including China, South Korea, Indonesia and India, have plans for major expansion. These aren't societies that greatly value environment safety. 

Nuclear power bristles with safety and environmental problems. Radiation is the most ubiquitous. Each stage of the nuclear fuel cycle releases ionising radiation, an invisible, intangible, silent poison, which damages the DNA of cells and causes cancer or genetic disorders. 

The chief minister, however, insisted that while taking initiative in inviting investment in the state, he had never deviated from the official party line of the CPI(M). “Once our slogan was: Punjiwadi dur hato (Go away capitalists). We can’t raise such slogans now. Once we were in favour of confiscating all foreign capital. Now we have changed our party programme. Whatever I am doing has been approved by our party programme,” Buddhadeb said.

“No doubt the capitalists exploit. But we have no other alternative but to compete with other states and invite them. It is necessary to send out the signal far and wide that we need private capital. Let them make profit. We want employment generation. There is mutual interest,” the chief minister said arguing that Indian Marxists were learning from their comrades from China, Vietnam and several Latin American countries.

Bhattacharjee, however, candidly admitted that the attempt to set up the SEZ in Nandigram had been a mistake. “From the very first day I understood that Nandigram was a major mistake. The unrecorded bargadars are the most affected, both in Nandigram and Singur. They have become most violent,” he observed and said, “We must go slow in Nandigram. We will not take a step further till the Centre finalizes its SEZ policy.” 

As expected, the chief minister’s note failed to satisfy the Left Front constituents. Leaders of CPI, RSP and Forward Bloc said that they would raise serious objections to the direction of the state government’s industrialization process in the coming Front meeting to be held next month. EOM 



West Bengal Govt, flays Union Budget 
Kolkata, Feb. 28 (PTI): In a critical observation of the Union Budget, the West Bengal government today said that the 2007-08 budget had failed to address the two basic problems of unemployment and inflation now afflicting the majority of common people. 

"We don't find any special reason to be enthused with this year's Union Budget", State Finance Minister Asim Dasgupta said in his reaction. 

Apart from routine constitutionally mandatory devolution of state's share of central taxes, the states, particularly West Bengal, had not received any "significant dispensation", he noted. 

In curbing inflation, Dasgupta said, the Centre should not only self-critically examine its previous decision of allowing corporate houses, including FDI in retail trade (with monopolistic price jacking inflation), but also come out with complete course of action in closely interacting with the state for extending overall public distribution system in essential commodities. 

He said that in the Centre-State relations, no significant proposal for debt relief related to past small saving loan to the state had been mentioned. 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A farmer's Budget? Really?


March 01, 2007

The slogans with which Finance Minister P Chidambaram wanted to impress everyone in his speech for the Union Budget for 2007-08 were about inclusive growth, top priority for agriculture and second green revolution.

A close scrutiny of the Budget reveals that he has not put money on the issues of concern that he mouthed in these slogans; especially if we look at the Budget from the perspective of rural and agricultural sectors.

But first let us give him credit where it is due.

The Groundwater Recharge Scheme that Chidambaram has proposed is certainly an urgently needed step in the right direction.

However, the way he has described the scheme in the Budget speech raises a number of questions. Chidambaram said, "The strategy for ground water recharge is to divert rain water into 'dug wells.'" But Rs 4,000 per structure allocated for this seems rather high. In Saurashtra (Gujarat), farmers have achieved this at a cost of just a few hundred rupees.

We also need to await details on how the proposed 7 million structures over about 850 blocks in 100 districts will be implemented. It is also not clear as to for what period will the amount of Rs 1,800 crore (Rs 18 billion) be given through NABARD for this purpose.

The Indian water resource establishment is like a king who keeps trying to expand his reign over new areas without bothering to see what is happening to the acquisitions. According to a World Bank estimate, India currently needs about Rs 17,000 crore (Rs 170 billion) every year just to maintain the created infrastructure.

Two years ago in his Budget speech Chidambaram was ruing the fact that the efficiency of India's irrigation sector is one of the lowest in the world. He has done nothing to make amends on that score.

On the contrary, he did exactly the opposite when he increased the allocation for Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme by a whopping 55 per cent to Rs 11,000 crore (Rs 110 billion).

Similar is the story of the irrigation component of Bharat Nirman, most of which goes for big dams and long distance canals that have proved too costly and relatively unproductive over the years.

Compare that with a paltry allocation of Rs 100 crore for the National Rainfed Area Authority.

For what he described as his dream scheme two years back, namely, repair, renovation and restoration of water bodies, worse is in store. The water bodies are to depend on the World Bank and other aid agencies.

The finance minister has nothing to offer to solve the biggest problem of India's water sector: utter lack of transparency and accountability.

Moreover, he has proposed nothing credible to arrest land deprivation, to provide measures for increasing productivity of small farms and national average yields of crops. One step he could easily have taken was to enthusiastically promote a new method of rice cultivation called System of Rice Cultivation, which has the potential of increasing the yields even with a reduction in inputs like water, seeds and chemicals.

The entry of corporate bodies in the agriculture sector (corporate farming, marketing) has in fact created problems for the rural people. But the Economic Survey for 2006-07, indeed calls private entry an improvement and talks rather positively about Special Economic Zones.

On the urgent and expanding problem of farmer suicides, the Budget has nothing to offer on the one score that could really help: ensuring that farmers get remunerative prices for their produce. The only thing Chidambaram offered was, well, another, (Dr R Radhakrishna) committee.

2007-08 is the first year for the 11th Five-Year Plan and neither the Approach Paper nor the Budget has any credible steps to achieve inclusive and sustainable agricultural growth. A sector, which the finance minister noted, supports 115.5 million families.

It is doubtful if Chidambaram would get even passing marks for this performance. In fact the results of his performance were available a day before when people of Punjab and Uttarakhand ousted the UPA governments.