Cover Story

March 23, 1997

THE WEEK

New Rural Rich
Rising farm incomes are transforming the villages of India. With land and money at their command, the new 'zamindars' are better off than the urban middle class. They own telephones, TVs, and Tatamobiles. And with 'humble farmer' Deve Gowda at the helm, things can only get better.

I have grazed cattle, planted seeds and taken potatoes and bananas from my fields to the market. I have dug canals for water to come into the fields...." The man who did all this and more is today the Prime Minister. H.D. Deve Gowda proudly styles himself the 'humble farmer'.
After Charan Singh, Gowda is the second Indian Prime Minister to make play with his farmer background. He even told an audience in Shamli, western Uttar Pradesh, last year that he felt the spirit of Charan Singh was guiding him!
For him, and millions of others like him across the country, new technologies, high-yielding seeds and cash crops have meant a transformation in agricultural income. Agriculture is no more a low-paying, undependable profession.
With land and money at their command, the can-do farmers are the new zamindars of the liberalisation era. They prefer to live in the villages, own telephones, TVs and Tatamobiles and are the envy of the urban middle class.They are also hot targets of marketmen selling anything from chips to chocolates and chiffon.
Obviously, country people's tastes are changing, not only in what they eat and wear but also in the kind of education their children get. But their path to progress begins and ends in their village.
It was no different for Gowda the politician and his family. Though he did his diploma in civil engineering and took up smalltime contract works, Gowda remained an agriculturist at heart.
In the early 1960s as an MLA, he made a portentous move. Upset about a remark in the family about his political career, Gowda moved out and bought some barren land in nearby Padhivalahippe village in Hassan district of Karnataka. He could easily have moved to either the nearest town or the state capital Bangalore, but he decided to stay and fight.
"The place was supposed to be haunted by the ghost Muneshwara, but I asked my wife whether she was willing to take the risk," Gowda told The Week. "We sold her jewellery and bought the land. As we had no house in the village. we erected a temporary hut and used jute bags as bedding."
But Paduvalahippe was soon irrigated by the waters of the Hemavathi and the desolate land gave its bounty in the form of sugarcane, paddy, fruits and vegetables. The ghost Muneshwara never troubled him, proving it to be what it was: a local tale.
Gowda's spread now extends beyond Paduvalahippe to the neighbouring villages of Hassan district. "Our family prospered by agriculture, not because agriculture is the best way to make money." said Gowda. "I still feel city-based businesses and industries give far more money than what the man with the maximum land can get in a state like Karnataka. The profit margins are very low for farmers, compared with those in businesses and industries."
Mange Ram of Sonepat in Haryana proved that profits, both monetary and social, are there to be had by hard work. This jhimmer (basket weaver caste) "did not have even a grain of sand" to call his own when he, along with his three younger brothers, started sharecropping in 1985. Now the brothers are the proud owners of 25 acres of prime agricultural land.
"We chose rocky terrain so that we wouldn't have to pay much. Later we acquired some wasteland at a throw-away price," said Mange Ram. "We took a loan from the zamindar at high interest and sank a tubewell. After the first harvest we bought a second-hand tractor. From then onwards we bought four acres every year."
Ram's social standing has also gone up. His younger brother is a panchayat member. He modestly puts his income at Rs 3 lakh a year. But his possessions pronounce him wealthy. Some time ago he bought property worth Rs 4.25 lakh. He has two trucks and is a commission agent in Delhi's biggest vegetable market and this business has taken him all over the country.
Ompathi, his wife, makes tea on a gas stove. The fridge in the kitchen is brand new and the utensils are of stainless steel. "I bought my scooter, fridge, TV, air-cooler and everything else from Delhi," said Ram.
Ompathi shops in Delhi, but it is Ram who holds the purse-strings. "The womenfolk choose whatever they want and I buy it for them. These days it is difficult to hold them back," he said
He is not swayed by life's luxuries, though. He can very well afford a colour TV, but has opted for a black & white. In fact, a colour TV is a rarity in the village of 500 families (there are 100 to 150 black & white TV sets in the village).
"Why should I spend unnecessarily when the purpose is served?" he reasoned. His recently-built two-storey house has no furniture except a few cots that serve his purpose!
Such earthy logic and the "better quality of life in the villages: govern the no-frills existence of Gorur Raghavachar Jagannath, 44, too. This relation of the Kannada literary giant Gorur Ramaswamy lyengar pledged and pawned his way up from near penury after he lost his father at the age of 17. And he did it by sticking to agriculture in his native Gorur in Hassan district.
He says his income from his 20 acre holding is now in excess of Rs 3 lakh a year. On 15 acres, bathed by the waters of the Hemavathy, he raises paddy using modern farming techniques and on five acres of dry land he grows potato and maize; just last year he bought the five acres of wetland he had held on lease.
He is proud of his progress. "The effort that I am putting into farming. If I put outside (in business), I will definitely earn more. But this is more satisfying." he said echoing Gowda's sentiments. "Village life is in no way inferior to city life. The only thing lacking is good education. In all other respects this is more convenient."
For Asha, a commerce graduate, Gorur was a pleasant surprise. If the gobar gas to light the stove was a novelty, the workout on the threshing floor in the backyard was a refreshing change form the calisthenics on satellite TV. She manages all the farm activities on the home front while Jagannath toils in the fields coaxing bullocks and men alike to give of their best.
He dreams not about buying the latest model car or refurbishing his wardrobe with designer wear, but of buying more land to develop a farm of fruit trees.
So does K. Jayaram, 40, of Kuppegala village in Mysore district. He wants to buy land and add to the 50 acres he inherited from his father. But today, this paddy farmer is thinking in terms of using improved farming methods and branching off into cash crops, poultry and sericulture. Him ambition: own a modern farm with drip irrigation and other techniques that would cut labour costs.
The pungent smell of hay and dung announces Jayaram's village house. It has rooms arranged neatly on either side of a passage that runs the length of the house and opens into Jayaram and his wife Sunita live with their three-year-old son Tejas in a 'joint nuclear family' set-up. In a practice that is becoming increasingly widespread, the siblings live in their share of the divided property within the same compound.
Jayaram boasts a television with a cable connection and a fridge which gives his wife Sunita an edge over the other villagers. He is against cable TV in the villages, though. "It is okay in the city for bored housewives to pass the time. In the villages it will only make the women lazy." he said. Jayaram rides a motorcycle and does not feel the need for a car, though it is not out of his reach for someone who claims a net annual income in excess of Rs 2 lakh.
Though it is not a full-fledged consumer society yet, the ill-effects of consumerism are already visible in the villages. "Ragi and rice may not available but branded liquor of all types is available on my street with about 20 houses, " said Jayaram.
The influence of the cities is visible most in the houses they have built. For instance, the house of K. Puttaswamy of Kuppegala village could be straight out of one of the more fashionable localities of Mysore city, which is about 45 km away.
Puttaswamy, 45, built the house four years ago after resisting pressures from his friends to move to the city. But today this farmer, who owns 16 acres and is the former president of the Mysore Dairy, is a bitter man. He would still prefer to stay in the village but the uncertainty of the sugarcane and mulberry crops frustrates him, and on top of that there is the difficulty in getting labour.
Puttaswamy despairingly watches the labourers board the morning bus for the more paying construction work in the city, cursing under his breath the metal-topped road that runs through his village and brings the buses there. But it is the same bus his two daughters take to their school. His son is doing a degree course at Mysore University.
Government schools and colleges in the villages are just not good enough for the children of these farmers who set great store by education, be it in Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana or anywhere else. In Andhra Pradesh's Telangana region, many villagers do not mind selling their land to move to the cities for the sake of their children's education.
In Rajpura near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, according to some estimates, more than 90% of the children of the village go private schools outside the village.
"You should see how the village children go to school nowadays; with school bag, water bottle and tiffin carrier," said Rajpal Singh a lawyer who lives in a joint family with his parents and five brothers.
Together these educated upwardly mobile farmers own more than 40 acres and they will settle for nothing less than the best schools for their children.
"The government schools are no good; they lack the kind of teachers we had when we were students," said Rajpal. While no one will dispute this better? Rajpal believes that the three public schools around his village are the best ones going for his and his brothers' children.
The schools, which insist that the children wear ties and blazers, have buses which shuttle them to and from school. Interestingly, in these buses are not just rich kids but also children of the not-so-rich Dalits like Tejpal Singh, an electrician village.
As the buses come to pick up the children one is reminded of another day and age when a young boy walked eight kilometres to school to fulfil his father's wish that he study. "I also looked after the cattle...., " Gowda reminisced to The Week.
But there are several farmers who are so disappointed by the returns that they regret turning to farming.
I gave up my law practice in 1981 for farming. But today I feel I made the wrong decision, " said Chikka Veeragowda, 48, of Siddaramanna Hundi village in Mysore district of Karnataka. He holds degrees in science and law and owns 6.5 acres. But his income from sugarcane and mulberry has dropped to a new low thanks to high production costs and the "import of china silk."
The government's farm policies are to blame, said Veeragowda. He is convinced that the farm sector can improve only with the entry of multinationals.
He already feels the influence of multinationals, though, when his school-going children--two boys and a girl--demand the latest chocolates or his wife wants cosmetics. He gets them from the city as they are yet to make an appearance in his village which, incidentally, is named after the Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister Siddaramiah.
His links with the city run deeper than an occasional trip--he owns a plot of land in Mysore but has no plans of settling there. At least not yet.
Farmers who sell their land to migrate to the cities "only stand to lose", said Vidyasagar Rao, a landowner in Hyderabad with farms on the outskirts of the city. Others like former Speaker Prabhakar Reddy would not dream of going back to their land in their villages, for agriculture in not economical.
But one politician kept going back to his land, when he was still an MLA, and does not regret it. He is now the Prime Minister and is still enthused by the sight of rural audiences to return to his roots.
Deve Gowda would go by bus every weekend to his village. When his children started growing up he took a house on rent in Holenarsipur, leaving the farm management to his wife. With prosperity the land holding expanded in the mid-1970s, as leader of the opposition in the assembly, he entrusted the day-to-day management to his second son Revanna,who is now a cabinet minister in Karnataka.
Gowda conceded that rural development was very uneven. While the cities had grown and been enriched at a phenomenal pace, agriculture was hobbled by oppressive regulations and economic disincentives, he said.
In an attempt to set this right, in this year's budget the United Front government abolished certain Central legislation. It urged the states to follow this lead and do away with as many controls as possible so that the people could benefit fully from their success.
If this needs political will, it needs enterprise to remove social controls, as the people of Ankapur village in Andhra Pradesh's Nizamabad district showed by their community-oriented development.
This village has many castes and the Gudeti Kapus--over 260 families-- are the dominant caste. But the people are united irrespective of caste or political affiliations.
Decisions are taken unanimously through democratic means. Most of the people who hold land now, on an average of about eight acres, bought it from a mini-raja, Mohan Reddy, in the early 70s. In 1971 the first seed processing unit of the state was started in Ankapur and the people of the village have not looked back since.
As Raja Reddy, ex-village development officer, said: "Politics plays a dominant role only during the elections. After that it is only the land and its produce: political affiliations don't matter at all."
The village has 200 scooters, 10 Marutis and two jeeps. There was a time when the villagers invested huge sums in gold but today posh architect-designed houses are the craze here. The woman of the house, too, works in the field along with the farm hands, the only difference being that she arrives on a scooter or in a Maruti. But once in the field the distinction blurs.
Vijaya, 23, could pass for a labourer. She personally tends her 10 acres after sending her two children; a boy (7) and girl (5), to school. At times she even cooks for the farm hands so that they do not waste time going to a restaurant. In fact, more often than not the women of the Gudeti Kapu community make the decisions in this village.
Said Deglurkar, a seed processor at nearby Armoor: "The man will not decide. He will postpone the decision till after he consults his wife." He points out that the wealth of the people of the area includes income from seed processing too.
With affluence came changes in attitudes and social behaviour. Child marriage, which used to be prevalent, no longer takes place and divorce is not a strange word here. Girls and boys who were married as kids could opt out of the marriage once they were old enough, and this was decided at the sarva samaj or village committee of the elders.
Now both boys and girls of their village go to school and the girls study up to intermediate. But will these educated kids continue tilling the land of their forefathers? The elders are doubtful, considering the craze for city life. Says ex-sarpanch Gaddam Rajanna: "The children are of this generation. When I was sarpanch I could not read and write. Now things have changed. The next generation will have to decide what they want to be."
Bijender of Mehandipur village near Sonepat in Haryana, has decided that he, a graduate, will be a farmer. The inspiration was his father Roop Ram, who started with five acres about two decades ago. Now they have 20 acres which gives them not less than a couple of lakhs of rupees a year.
Reaping a rich harvest in life, Roop Ram has passed on the mantle to Bijender, 23, and his eldest brother, a matriculate. Undeniably, subsidies have helped farmers a great deal, but they won't admit it. "Power costs only 50 paise a unit. It is almost free," said P.K. Mahapatra, the district commissioner of Sonepat. "More than the direct loans that were given to level the land, to buy gypsum and the crop loans, the indirect subsidies have contributed much to the well-being of the farmers. Tubewells, irrigation canals and the vast cooperative system have helped them immensely though they would not admit it."
"I have never taken any sort of government loan except for the tractor," said Roop Ram drawing on his hookah in his newly-built two-storey baithak (outhouse). Bijender comes in from the Bijender comes in from the fields driving his tractor and is soon kick-starting his scooter to a part-time job as supervisor in a nearby factory.
His success graph is impressive, so is his income, though he won't divulge figures. "We have everything we need," said Bijender. Obviously, furniture is not a priority; the rich-looking baithak is sparsely furnished with a few cots. They bought a TV set eight years ago, but Roop Ram still prefers the radio.
If old habits die hard, the Roop Ram family has been very careful about acquiring new ones. For instance, Bijender, despite the riches, cannot even imagine buying a car. A cooking gas connection, too, is an unnecessary expenditure for this austere farmer.
But the general trend is to make the best of both worlds. Shankar, 26, of Vedappati village near Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu looks every inch the farmer that he is, in his shirt and lungi, with a towel thrown over his shoulder. "But I dress in jeans when I go to the city for an evening out," he admitted.
Shankar, a tenth class drop-out, manages his father Natarajan's 10 acre farm--teak on two acres and coconut on eight--and a modern poultry of 15,000 birds. The total annual income runs into several lakh rupees and the family lives in a palatial house on the farm. No one in his family regrets his father's decision, in 1972, to resign his government job and take up farming on the three acres he had then. Today Natarajan is a broad-based farmer who is a name to reckon with in farming and poultry circles.
The Lure of the city lights may have tempted many a farmer but today the city is moving to the villages in more ways than one, thanks to good roads and better communication facilities. Predictably, consumer products are a dominating presence. In Ram Narayan's shop in Mahandipur the best multinational brands of confectionery have replaced the traditional sweet-meats. "Parents would not mind spending a little more when their children cry for sweets after seeing the advertisements on TV" said Ram's wife Roopwati, sitting in the shop which is actually a room rented out in Rajinder's baithak. "Whatever sells in the cities sells here too."
Even marble tiles! Ram Singh of the same village has laid them in his courtyard. A marginal farmer, Ram Singh built the house five years ago for Rs 1.5 lakh and was persuaded to lay the tiles by his sons who work in the fields with him. "The income is not much, you can put it as one lakh rupees per annum," Ram Singh said. He is obviously wary of revealing his real income.
Ambalal Patel, 55, a farmer of Kuvasana village in Gujarat's Mehsana district has no such problem. His income from his 18-acre holding is around a whopping Rs 1 crore a year. A posh bungalow replaced his kuchcha house a few years ago and his fleet of cars kicks up dust in the dirt roads of his village. Not long ago he could not have imagined such luxuries from the single crop of castor he harvested.
A tubewell that he sank and the government's farmer-friendly policies made this turnaround possible, according to him. Now, besides castor he raises bajra and vegetables which have a ready market in Ahmedabad, 107 km away. He harvests three crops a year.
He has diversified into the chemicals business. which his younger brother, a postgraduate in science, runs. Along the way he discarded khadi, picked up a taste for expensive aftershaves and acquired five cars! Apparently the only thing that did not change was the traditional Gujarati food he eats.
The winds of plenty have swept the sugarcane farmers of western Uttar Pradesh off their feet; their pattern of life changed with the spiralling cane prices. Many of them now live in Meerut, the nerve centre of West UP, and reap a rich harvest in the villages. The land ceiling act has it that a person can hold just 12.5 acres but the landed gentry found a way to circumvent the rule. Each member of the family would have 12.5 in his or her name. And if the family had more land than the members could account for they would put it in some distant cousin's name. This has often led to bitter tussles for land, but the practice continues.
The upper classes, however, realise that they can no longer be rigid about tradition. "I am compelled to eat with a lower caste man," lamented Narendra Dublesh, who owns 50 acres in Agwanpur, 35 km from Meerut. "What would you do if an IAS officer happens to be a Dalit? You have to put up with it."
Dublesh, a Bania, has added only 12.5 acres to his ancestral land since he took up farming in 1965 after graduation His son will, in all probability end up on the family farm because Dublesh is unwilling to pay any capitation fee for his MBA admission.
"It is a waste," said Dublesh. "I would have to spend more than Rs 5 lakh for his MBA and then what would he get? A job that pays at the most Rs 6,000 a month. What can he do with Rs 6,000 in city like Delhi? He will be much better off on the family farm."Surprisingly, his daughters do not remain behind the iron purdah of custom any more. The elder daughter is doing a computer course after graduation and the younger one is studying hotel management. "Times are changing" said Dublesh.
But the women of Vijay Singh"s family in Rajpura near Meerut seem to be leading lives frozen in time. They still live in a house which is few yards away from the main house and outsiders are obviously not welcome there.
But MTV has arrived here, thanks to Vijay Singh's lawyer son Rajpal. Their dish antenna on the two-storey kher is the only one in the village. Rajpal lives with his five brothers in a joint family that owns more than 40 acres. The family had barely eight acres till 1970. "In those days we used to earn hardly Rs 20,000 a year. Now we make about Rs 3 lakh after all expenses, " said Rajpal.
They are rich, ambitious and adventurous and they are slowly but surely changing the rural scene in India. And Gowda believes that if controls were abolished, the Indian farmer could match, even do better than his counterparts in any country. Today if Gowda could have his way he would like to soak up this change in Paduvalahippe and Haradanahalli "minus SPG and with minimum staff". Easier said than done unless you're one of the new rural rich.

SACHIDANANDA MURTHY with V.M.
RAJASEKHAR and NIRANJAN NIKAM in
karnataka, RAJESH RAMACHANDRAN
in Haryana & Uttar Pradesh, and
LALITA IYER in Hyderabad

INTERVIEW : DEVE GOWDA

Controls on agriculture will go:

PRIME Minister Deve Gowda was returning to New Delhi past midnight after a day spent among farmers of Karnataka. He told some plain truths to the state agriculture minister C.Bhyre Gowda who got so peeved that the threatened to resign the next day. But the Prime Minister was happy with his interaction and despite sleepiness (he had not slept on the dais as is his wont) and throat pain, he spoke to THE WEEK on the special Indian Air Force aircraft on his obsession with agriculture and farmers. Excerpts:

QUESTION : You were a farmer 50 years ago. How much has the Indian farmer's condition improved?
ANSWER : I cannot say there has been no development. Some individual farmers in every village have prospered and their children have got good jobs. But they are an island compared with the ocean of the hard pressed farmers. The majority are still prisoners of the vagaries of the monsoon and the market, and face second class treatment.
But successive governments have spent a lot on rural development and agriculture. How can you say it is second class treatment?
That is why I said something has been done. But if you look at the magnitude of the crisis in the rural areas, what we have spent in the last 50 years is nothing. The development int he country itself is uneven. Look at the way the urban areas have grown, and the way urban people are looked after. City-dwellers get subsidy for everything-transport, milk, food, power. But the same is not available to farmers.
But there are various schemes for rural development....
Yes. But how many have benefited? Industries enjoy greater freedom to sell their products and fix the prices than farmers. The farmer did not get anything from successive governments. Now some states are giving cheap rice and wheat.
Another example of uneven development is that no farmer gets loan to build a house, whereas government servants get 70 months' salary. Banks and other institutions do not accept land as loan security. I have ordered they should give housing loans. Is not a farmer entitled for credit to live in a better house?
There is greater mobility from villages to urban areas....
Majority of these villagers are living in urban slums. We must allow them to stay in the village and prosper by tilling their land. I called the officers and said they must treble the loan to the agriculture sector.
When I went to the rural areas, I found there was no facility for education of the girl child. I have begun a new scheme. This scheme named after Kasturba Gandhi will be implemented in crisis areas like Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and not states like Kerala where there is even development in education and health sectors.
As in industrial development, there has been massive government investment in irrigation and power projects to help farmers.
Irrigation has helped certainly, But it cannot alone meet the needs of the people. After all there are vast areas which cannot be irrigated by the projects. We have to evolve a policy to help the overall development of farmers in all parts of India.
Till the time political parties and leaders go for short-term gains like wooing the organised sectors, this country has no salvation. As long as we pamper these classes in urban areas, and that applies to my party and myself, the privileged classes will ride over the underprivileged farmers.
What are you doing to end this anomaly?
In this budget we have dismantled many restrictive laws which prohibit the growth of agriculture. I have told states to review all land reforms laws and see whether they help or hinder growth of farmers. I have hiked agricultural subsidies by Rs 9,000 crore in one year. I want to encourage the farmers, especially in the dry regions, to go for high income practices like horticulture and floriculture so that even if a farmer has one or two acres, he can do well on this land.
I am pushing for government investment in infrastructure (cold storage, warehouses, roads, electrification, hybrid seeds, pesticides and fertiliser) and marketing.
What about funds?
I am enhancing financial support to agriculture from government and banks. There are six apex institutions in this country to lend money to industries but only one, NABARD, for the farmers who outnumber the industries. And the amount lent by these six industrial institutions is staggering compared with what NABARD has lent.
I told the Reserve Bank that there must be more apex institutions for agriculture, especially export-oriented agriculture. They have now agreed for a subsidiary of NABARD in three states. As chief minister I has written to then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao to abolish all controls on agriculture. He did not do it because officials are opposed to reforms in agriculture. But I am dismantling the controls in spite of opposition. I have asked all chief ministers to do the same in their states.
What will be the role of the farmer in another 50 years?
If we give him all the benefits which have been denied to him so far, the Indian farmer will do very well. Otherwise he would be pushed to the wall further. What we need is collective political will.

SACHIDANANDA MURTHY