The UPA Government's focus is on secondary (manufacturing) and tertiary (services like telecom, banking, insurance and IT) sectors, but the primary sector, which is agriculture, is badly neglected.
Recently the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave his government a 6 out of 10 for its performance in the past one year. In other words, he thinks that the performance of the UPA Government deserves a first class. Be that as it may, let us now critically examine what the performance of this government has been in the past year. On May 22, 2004, the UPA came to power and one of the promises contained in the Common Minimum Program (CMP) was that the new government would immediately address the farmers' lot, as there was a clear perception that the NDA lost favor in places like Andhra Pradesh because of the rural wrath in general and the farmers' ire in particular. One year into the UPA rule, one must critically scrutinize where Indian agriculture is heading to. To be sure, one of the first moves of the UPA Government was to appoint a new chairman to the National Farmers Commission (NFC), a brainchild of the Vajpayee Government, which did not or could not do much for the farmer during its rule. In fact, the real slide in agriculture had started much earlier, even during the Congress regime in the early nineties, when the economic "reforms" were set in motion.
The United Front Government and the NDA Government only added fuel to the fire by letting the farmer down. The hurried removal of the Quantitative Restrictions (QR) on more than 2000 items in one stroke, many of agricultural origin, saw prices of agricultural commodities tumbling and markets flooding with Australian apples, US cornflakes, Swiss butter and Cheese, French wines, Sri Lankan coconut, Vietnamese pepper, so on and so forth. |
