 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Farmers and workers of India are joining hands once again. There's going to be a massive series of protests and the farmers and workers are raising a series of demands from the government. Why are these protests important? What makes them significant, not just to the economics but the politics of the country? Joining us in the studio is Professor Prabhat Patnayak. He's a renowned economist and he'll tell us why these mobilizations are significant. Professor Patnayak, welcome to NewsClick. My colleague just spoke with you in Hindi and we thought for our English speaking audience we should do a little bit in English. So they're saying this will be one of the biggest mobilizations India has seen in at least a decade and I'm guessing part of it is because farmers and workers are getting together but they have different demands or differentiated demands. Can you tell us the topmost priority for both? You know at this moment I think quite apart from rally and so on the interests of the farmers and the workers coincide in a way that they have never done in Indian history. The reason is the following that if you have the farmers' incomes going down then many of them find it difficult to make their ends meet so they migrate to the towns, they swell the ranks of the unemployed or you know partially employed and bring down the real wage of the industrial or the urban workers. So a worsening of the living standards of the peasants worsens the living standards of the agricultural laborers because they don't get obviously the peasant is being squeezed in the peasant squeezes the laborers and additionally because of this migration to towns which multiplies in such a period these squeezes also on the urban workers so at a certain in a certain sense now all their interests are sort of coterminous. They're coterminous and yet what are the crucial demands for example the farmers want the MSP they want a loan waiver. That's right. The workers what are they seeking? That is true. In other words their specific demands may be different which obviously but on the other hand I'm saying that that their material interests at the moment converge. Their specific demands are different because obviously their specific terrains of work are different. The farmers are interested in MSP because of course the government wanted to do away with the MSP regime. They fought for more than a year on that. They prevented the government from doing it but one of the things they had demanded is that there should be a law providing MSP for a range of crops which the Swaminathan committee had recommended. Now this the government has not done you know at the moment we have some MSP for some food crops but on the other hand they wanted a wide range like in Kerala for instance now their rubber prices have crashed. So the whole idea is to have a statutory MSP for a whole range of crops and this is a very perfectly legitimate demand which the farmers are raising. The second demand about loan waiver is really linked to this because you see if you have if you have periodic crashing of crops then you find that you wouldn't be able to pay back the loans and what is more what has happened is that you see when the banks were nationalized the idea was that institutional credit that means bank credit would now go to the agricultural sector and that was a remarkable achievement in fact I believe it's a very major achievement hardly any country in the world that exists in which you have so many small borrowers being accommodated by the banking system. I mean you find cyclo rickshaw drivers with the cyclo rickshaw at the back saying hypothecated to the state bank of India so which is which is quite remarkable but the point is that after neoliberalism was introduced at the end of the 1980s beginning of 1990s institutional credit to agriculture has been withdrawn I mean progressively withdrawn they meet their priority sector lending norms because they are supposed to provide agriculture a certain proportion of credit but the definition of that priority sector called agriculture is now so wide that if you buy a scooter in a rural area then that is included in the priority sector lending if Coca Cola sets up a plant which which processes some raw materials available from locally in that case that is also priority sector lending so so now it has become so wide that really priority sector lending norms are being met but the farmers are not getting institutional credit which is why they have gone to all kinds of private money lenders you know microfinance organizations blade companies and so on and they charge exorbitant interest rates so it is not very surprising that from both sides the cost of credit has gone up and from the other side the prices anyway have not gone up proportionately and their periodic crashes right should should the minimum support price be expanded what are the economic arguments in favor of doing that the economic arguments in favor of doing that is actually to prevent the farmers from being squeezed by price crashes okay and that is a very very very easy way of also influencing farmers decisions to grow particular crops because depending on what the MSP is the farmers then decide what kind of crops to grow absolutely so if you want some crops to grow in that case one very convenient way is you raise the MSP on that okay so the point that the government and especially the supporters of the government are making is that now the economy is expanded and we are like the fourth biggest or third biggest and so therefore there's enough available for everyone enough cash available I guess is what they mean to go and buy whatever they want from the market is that really true no it is it is you know I think every one of these statements you made as government spokesman's comments can be contested but let me not contest all those statements it'll take too long but fundamentally I think undermining of food security in a country like India is suicidal. Indira Gandhi had seen this because the reason that the green revolution came up even Ramazhi agriculture minister was precisely because the Americans were arm twisting Indira Gandhi when she was prime minister Bihar famine had happened and therefore it became very clear that you cannot really remain dependent on western countries particularly on the U.S. for your food supplies you cannot run you see you cannot run a public distribution system on imported food so those who are talking about this I would like them to somehow show me how it is possible to run a PDS based upon imported food range because suppose some year you don't have enough foreign exchange to buy food range so what do you do you scale down your PDS is that so so so the point is if you're going to run the PDS if you're going to kind of you know meet a certain target audience of consumers in that case you have to have enough food range stocks and for that you have to procure and for that you have to produce absolutely so so so getting rid of food self-sufficiency would be disastrous so what you're saying is that the minimum support price is not something that the government just gives to farmers it is something on which people rely or they will not have food absolutely it is absolutely essential it is absolutely essential for an economy like ours it is really suicidal for us to give up this you know this the current arrangement we have is an arrangement that has emerged after years of practice you know it's an arrangement that synthesizes the interests of the consumers with the interests of the producers it synthesizes the the kind of you know amount of food that you get with the amount of food that you distribute right and so on so so that you know it has been worked out keeping in mind years of experience and if you muck about with it in that case the country would have to pay very dearly something is already very wrong isn't it which is why the farmers are not getting what they are spending to sow their crop or reap it or distribute it or be able to distribute it and the consumers are not able to get food unless the government increases the subsidy that it gives subsidized food so again the balancing of interest you talked about which way should the government leave you see the the the balancing of the interests of the producers and the consumers who was done through the food subsidy right in other words you gave the farmers a procurement price that was profitable for which all kinds of formulae to to to find out what is a profitable procurement price there was an agricultural price commission or CACP and that made recommendations government accepted so so that was based on a certain principle of remuneration remunerative price then to the consumers you gave at a price they could afford and the gap was made breached by the government by by by the by the fiscal system and that was the food subsidy now if you want to cut down the food subsidy or if you want to control the food subsidy in that case you would allow one party or the other to be squeezed right and I think what has actually happened I mean in in in a sense the the peasants the farmers have been squeezed under neoliberalism there is an example which I like giving you see when I first joined A&U in 1973 I joined as an associate professor and my basic salary was 700 rupees per month okay so an associate professor got that much those days now an associate professor's basic salary would probably be 50,000 at least per month which is 70 times greater on the other hand if you look at the those days the the kind of procurement price for wheat was about 700 rupees per quintal now it is what it is about 2000 at the most I mean even less per quintal so it has gone up by let's say 25 times so that 70 times versus 25 times and mind you associate professors and academics are not a very privileged group so the point is that the the farmers have really borne the brunt of this whole neoliberal regime that we have had we find that the states in which the MSP system the public distribution system is more effective tend to have farmers who are angrier and who are also I suppose able to afford to protest for a few days what happens to the workers in this context are they able to lose days of wage when the farmers have to fight for them what happens you know one of the good thing that is happening now is that the farmers are also taking up the demand for agricultural demands of agricultural laborers they are actually uniting this has not happened much in the past right but again you know the interests of the farmers and the interests of the agricultural workers can be synthesized through the government budget you know that if you have a comprehensive public distribution system not just for the urban areas but also for the rural areas after all that is that was the suggestion which was made which was actually has not been fully accepted or implemented but nonetheless a substantial proportion of the population was supposed to have been covered not universal suppose having covered by the PDS that would have included the agricultural workers as well in which case the agricultural workers would have got the benefit of low food prices with the government's budget bearing the burden but it is important I mean they haven't got it but it is important that now the farmers themselves are talking in terms of defending the interests of agricultural workers MG and RHS is a way of also boosting the wages of agricultural workers right so so the point is that they are getting some support from institutionally because of the existence of schemes like MG and RHS and they would get a lot more support institutionally if you had universal PDS right so we also find that the more farmers protest the more workers join them and the hold hands hold each other's hands to raise their demands you know the government makes promises and then backs out so what does one do no these protests would have to escalate obviously the government promised when the when the kishans which drew their agitation right the government promised that they would keep the laws in abeyance but on the other hand the kishans were certainly under the impression that the government was going to implement MSP for the range of crops the government reneged on that quite apart from the fact that the government also you know treated this this this man with kid gloves okay but but the thing is that the government naturally is pursuing neoliberalism with a brutality and neoliberalism is anti peasant anti kishan okay therefore the government's interests and the kishan interests are really contradictory right but the idea is to force the government's hands and of course in the process of forcing this if a new powerful political bloc emerges of workers peasants and agricultural workers then that is something which would stand the country in good state in future it would be an unbeatable force absolutely yes so how large a mobilization should we expect what what is going to be the format well you know this is certainly going to be larger than the last rally you know i mean because i was i was also the chairman of the reception committee for that so it's certainly going to be larger than the last rally one crore households have been contacted okay and if within each household you assume four to five members that means four to five crores of people have been directly contacted by these organizations and i think that is an enormous mobilization absolutely so so i i think it has a great potential for bringing about political change in the country and it comes at a very crucial moment absolutely because you see the government strategy has always been to mobilize the poor on the basis of religious communalism and to mobilize the rich on the basis of material advantages of various kinds that is not going to work on this that's right this is a blow against that the fact that the poor are coming together by poor i mean the the the oppressed classes are coming together on material demands means breaking the discourse which till now they were trapped within right and thank you very much for joining us and that's all we have for today thanks very much for watching news click do keep watching us and do follow us on our social media channels thanks again