The Math Doesn’t Add Up

Even after the protests, the enhanced rate that Noida farmers are getting for their land is only a fraction of what it costs to buy land in the township

Last year, a secretary level technocrat in the Ministry of Agriculture was lamenting on the sidelines of an international conference on food scarcity how one of the greatest challenges that we face in India is that there just aren’t enough means of transporting farm produce from the point of production to the point of purchase. “Tomatoes will rot in the farmers’ fields with no one willing to pay him 50 paise a kg for the produce and he will continue to be poor. A few hundred kilometres away, in a city like Delhi, the average consumer reeling under backbreaking prices will pay Rs 50 a kg for the same about-to-rot tomatoes,” he explained, by way of an example. “If the same farmer got Rs 2 for a kg for his produce at the farm and the consumer paid Rs 20 for it in the city market, both would be pleased. An even better scenario would be to provide technology close to the farm that can either process the vegetable produce or keep it fresh for a longer period. The farmer’s income would go up, and the consumer’s expenses would come down. Maybe what the former demands for a kg would only be a few rupees less than what the latter pays for it. We are working on those technologies,” he said.

But, this piece of writing is not about food processing technologies and the advances we have failed to make in the last several decades, even as nearly one-third of the fruits and vegetables produced in the country go waste. It is about the land on which this food is grown. That land which continues to be bought and sold as a commodity at the same spot, with the end user paying several times more for it than what the farmer who parted with that land ever got for it. At any given point of time, there is a group of farmers in the country fighting a losing battle against the acquisition of their land for conversion to uses other than agriculture. Often, these agitations turn violent. Farmers get killed, a few lakh rupees are paid as compensation for each of the dead, and livelihoods are lost without being adequately compensated for. Politicians make electoral gains or losses on these agitations, and life moves on.

Spurred by the recent farmers’ agitation along the Yamuna Expressway and the Allahabad High Court’s orders involving land acquisition for Noida Extension adjoining the national capital, farmers whose farms were acquired as long as 35 years ago to set up the Noida satellite township have started agitating, demanding higher compensation for the land acquired from them. Middle-class consumers and the media that cater to them have been quick to denounce the demands as not only absurd but also ‘opportunistic blackmail’. This, despite the fact that Noida authority officials themselves admit that this land was acquired for a pittance and adequate compensation was not paid for it. Proposals to give a portion of the developed land (10 per cent, according to the last such proposal 13 years ago) have not been acted upon. In the past 35 years, while the township has thrived, those farmers have waited for their compensation. They would have moved on too, perhaps, if they had been adequately compensated or given a share in the development that came to their doorsteps but stopped just short of benefiting them.

Consider this: in Noida, the enhanced rate of compensation—announced days after a 14-year-old boy was killed in police firing during a farmers’ agitation—is roughly Rs 1,200 per square metre. The same piece of land, when it is a plot for house construction, costs 10 to 25 times more. Of course, there is a process of development—the provision of access and amenities for the homes to be livable—that takes place. But the math doesn’t add up.

Last year in August, the Punjab government paid out Rs 1.5 crore an acre to farmers who were losing their land to an international airport at Mohali. The committee formed to decide the compensation in Punjab includes the local MP and MLAs from the area. This ensures that if the committee members fix a lower compensation, they do so at the risk of losing elections. The government can act if it wants to and provide better rates without waiting for a new law, like it did in the case of Punjab, or it can choose to threaten farmers with the might of its brute police force and archaic laws.

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