Are Farmers the new trade unions?

Recently, a survey team that had gone to a spot called their Headquarters to say that the villagers had come and stopped the survey. “No work related to plant X will be allowed.,” they declared to the team. Plant X was in operation for a decade and wanted to expand. The villagers had been given fair compensation. The land where the survey was planned amounted to few more double-digit acres.

The survey team was called back. The boss who had sent them felt that people were hired to do a survey, not to die.

From inquiries, it transpired that the villagers had blown the compensation on liquor and had got used to a lifestyle in which they did not have to work. Having foolishly spent the money, they wanted to extort some more.

Sound familiar? This is the story that keeps repeating itself all over India. “Farmers” can now come and stop any project for any length of time. Four times the cost or eight times the cost, whatever one gets paid will run out someday if not invested and instead used for daily expenses of a life which only the families with high regular income can afford. Not much of a mob is required, hardly a dozen are needed to paralyze the sarkar.

Farmers’ children need to be absorbed in industries, and for that farmers need to not beat up the survey teams, or not gherao an existing plant or an ongoing work to extort some more compensation.

Trade Unions were concentrated in West Bengal, Kerala, Mumbai, Modinagar, and Kanpur. But “farmers” are everywhere, all over India.

Red tape, red tape everywhere…

And the plants which escape the sights of farmers catch the fancy of NGT (National Green Tribunal). Or numerous Pollution Control Boards, Or Pollution Control Authorities Or courts. The lower courts, the higher courts, or supremely higher courts. Sometimes they all come together to pin down the industry.

Then there are over 150 clearances, permissions, and NOCs to obtain. Then a dozen more new Acts to comply after every parliament session.

And after all these efforts to kill Capital Creation come the never-ending crop failures, and loan waiver programmes to consume the accumulated Capital. The weather was always like this, capricious. In the past, during summers the harvested wheat would come under a heavy downpour before it could be thrashed. People would salvage whatever they could. Or sugarcane flattened in a hailstorm. But nobody ever thought that the government would or should compensate them. Suicide over crop failure? Never, never heard of that till the 1980s.

Loans had disappeared by the 70s, because of the Green Revolution. Otherwise, debt was a constant of life for thousands of years. Again nobody ever thought that the government would “waive” off those loans. Now the debts are back, and this time not because of the loan-sharks, but because governments waive them off every five years. Sometimes sooner.

Degrees don’t mean jobs

Then farmers’ children spend about ten lakhs to get an Engineering degree, only to queue for sanitary workers’ jobs. With applicants to posts ratios in the range of 1000 to 1. The population dependent on agriculture still remains above 50%. The figure is 1% for all the developed economies. Imagine the same ratio, and farmers’ income would increase 50 times in our country.

But for that farmers’ children need to be absorbed in industries, and for that farmers need to not beat up the survey teams, or not gherao an existing plant or an ongoing work to extort some more compensation. First, the Leftists consumed five decades of the country, and before they were overthrown, the infected the “farmers” with a deadlier strain of the same virus. And why farmers, every time I post about the PhDs queuing up for peons’ jobs, the “economists” on social media jump in with long posts about how the “education standard” can be improved and how that will solve the problem. For at least the last 15 years I am writing that industries, trade, businesses give us jobs, not our degrees. But the song never stops: “Spend more on education, and the problem of unemployment will be solved.”

The Leftists with the saffron flag are as clueless today as they were during those five decades. They sincerely, most sincerely, believe that they can make Socialism work because they are honest as against those Lootians over there. Many in fact hate prosperity and believe in the ideal of a self-sufficient village populated by the subsistence farmers.

Chile, Columbia, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran…….. media doesn’t tell us the real story. Hungry mobs are burning cities everywhere. France and Europe are now relatively quiet. Not because it has no unemployed youth but because it has no youth. The “youth” it is importing are not interested in jobs. Welfare does it for them. Nobody can control a hungry mob. Not even the man who has almost wiped out terrorism and scrapped the 370, and is about to give the long-cherished grand temple. Did he not hear the age-old wisdom of his own countrymen: भूखे पेट भजन न होत गोपाला………

Knowing all this, even now one can survive only by numbing the mind. But even a numb mind will not be able to withstand the catastrophe of the return of the Lootians. Because next time they come, they will come to tip the country over. राम भला करे।