LETTERS

Issn 0012-9976
Ever since the rst issue in 1966, EPW has been Indias premier journal for comment on current affairs and research in the social sciences. It succeeded Economic Weekly (1949-1965), which was launched and shepherded by Sachin Chaudhuri, who was also the founder-editor of EPW. As editor for thirty-ve years (1969-2004) K rishna R aj gave EPW the reputation it now enjoys.

For Big Business

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C Rammanohar Reddy
EXECUTIVE Editor

aniket Alam
Deputy Editor

Bernard DMello
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subhash rai
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Circulation

he editorial Desperate for Justice (EPW, 25 May 2013) reveals the infringement and violation of human rights of the workers of Marutis Manesar plant. The police and administration are acting at the behest of the Maruti companys management and in any case, this government 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 Congressled 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 fundamental 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

Gauraang Pradhan Manager B S Sharma

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Incorrect Information

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Economic and Political Weekly

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Printed by K Vijayakumar at Modern Arts and Industries, 151, A-Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai-400 013 and published by him on behalf of Sameeksha Trust from 320-321, A-Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai-400 013. Editor: C Rammanohar Reddy.

he article Land Acquisition and Compensation: What Really Happened in 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 paper reects the authors lack of adequate and correct knowledge/information. First, under the heading Singur Episode: 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 heading 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 outside the Singur Census Town. The authors should have consulted concerned block development ofce to authenticate the information before making it public. The
june 1, 2013

villages Beraberi and Joymolla are successively seven and eight km away from this town. Third, land has also been acquired 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 Beraberi revenue 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 indeed raises questions about the methodological accuracy for selecting unaffected villages. The result of a eld-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 produce 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

he road to hell is paved with good intentions! In the union budget for 2013-14, a sum of Rs 5,000 crore has been earmarked for nancing construction of
EPW Economic & Political Weekly

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LETTERS

warehouses/godowns/silos/cold storages designed to store agricultural produce both in the public and the private sectors. The window will also nance through the state governments, construction of godowns by panchayats to enable farmers to store their produce. While the central government has clearly signalled its desire for adequate warehousing and space availability for storing farm produce and reducing wastages 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 smallholder farmers to build smaller warehouses 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 Infrastructure Development Fund (RIDF) norms). (2) Agencies owned/sponsored by state governments (as per RIDF norms). (3) Banks/nancial institutions (under the usual Automatic Renance Facility scheme of NABARD). (4) Direct loans to individual entrepreneurs, 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 operational 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, corporates 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 warehousing opportunity of Rs 5,000 crore to assist smallholder farmers. In most
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

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 ow of Rs 6 lakh crore in 2012-13) 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 prevailing Agricultural Produce Market Committee restrictions). All these factors force the farmer to sell at the lowest prices dictated by the traders. The smallholder farmer has no warehousing or nancial 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 existing National Cooperative Development Council warehouses for cooperatives. Its recent initiatives have been on traders and corporates building warehouses and operating them purely for prot. These schemes benet the retail traders and MNCs which are all set to make a killing in rural India. Instead of beneting smallholder farmers, this bonanza of Rs 5,000 crore will boost the prots 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/communitybased warehouses were built and operated, smallholder farmers would have beneted but, alas, today in NABARDs corridors of power, corporate houses

and power-brokers rule the roost and the noose tightens around the necks of smallholder farmers. Another ction about RIDF loans is that PRIs are theoretically enabled to borrow from RIDF. In 18 completed annual tranches of RIDF, how many PRIs have managed to secure loans from NABARD? Not a single loan and the ction continues to be perpetuated by NABARD. Another interesting development is that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has taken a tough stance on the refund of RIDF deposits drawn under RIDF XVII 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 benets and not for the poorer sections of people whose interests should have remained uppermost while designing NABARDs policies.
K G Karmakar
Mumbai

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 rst sentence should read as: One can begin from 20 years ago when Indias elite embraced neoliberalism,.... On page 45, column 1, para 2, second-last sentence should read as: Institutions and circumstances, given and transmitted 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 nancial aristocrat or business tycoon 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 EPW website.

Web Exclusives
The following articles have been uploaded in the past week in the Web Exclusives section of the EPW website. They have not been published in the print edition. Read them at http://epw.in (1) (2) (3) (4) Are Our Regulators Imaginative? D N Ghosh IPL: As Skewed as the System Sidharth Bhatia Liberal Education: The Road Not Taken Gautam Bhan Delhi Universitys Undergraduate Programme: Notes from the Archives Neeti Nair

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

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LETTERS

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Economic & Political Weekly

320-321, A to Z Industrial Estate Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400 013, India Email: edit@epw.in, epw.mumbai@gmail.com
vol xlviII no 22
EPW Economic & Political Weekly