Lack of aid blamed for ryots’ woes

Tirupati: Lack of government’s support is the root cause of farmers’ woes in the country, opined Principal of SV University College of Arts Prof G Savaraiah. Participated as chief guest in a literary forum programme on "Vyavasaya sambandha Navalalu"

(Novels relating to Agriculture) organised jointly by Sahithya Academy Regional Centre at Bengaluru, Sahithee Sravanthi, Tirupati and SV University Telugu Department here on Monday, he said with same volume of land holdings China could manage to produce around 700 million tonnes of food grains whereas India could manage to produce only 278 million tonnes with much difficulty.

The difference between the two countries is that in China, farmers get huge support from their government which is contrary to the case with India. In Western and European countries, the governments are giving 80-90 per cent subsidy to farmers in various forms.

In India, the government is not giving even Rs 5,000 subsidy to the farmers. For the last 3-4 years, farmers did not get input subsidy. Even the banks were not coming forward to rescue the farmers. This forced them to go to moneylenders to get finance with high interest rates. The farmer borns in debt, living in debt and die in debt, thereby transferring his debt burden to his son, he maintained.

Savaraiah added even the innocent farmers were not getting proper guidance here. When a commodity gets good price in one year, whole farming community is cultivating it next year. With abundance of supply, price comes down and the farmer gets huge losses. All these reasons forced many farmers to commit suicide and 3.86 lakh farmers have ended their lives in the country till date since 1991 when economic reforms began, he revealed.

Head of Telugu Department Prof Medipalli Ravi Kumar, who presided over the function said that nobody can express anger on farmers though they show it on any others including their parents.

Farmers receive that respect from everyone. The programme was intended to discuss various facets of farmers’ suicides and the novels on the problems of farmers.

He maintained the writings of Rayalaseema writers are entirely different from that of others. It was Seema writers only who went on ‘Pada Yatra’ on the problem of farmers’ suicides, he averred.

In the programme five novels of eminent writers, L Kannaiah Naidu, S Venkatarami Reddy, S Devendrachari, Namini Subramanyam Naidu and Palamaneru Balaji on agriculture and farmer related problems were discussed by scholars like Prof N Munirathnamma, Prof S Rajeswari, Prof R Rajeswaramma, Dr K Sridevi and Pilla Kumara Swamy.