This Good Friday, I went to Haryana to see the spectacle of the harvesting season that feeds India throughout summer. Agriculture works in annual way. Howsoever hard the Haryana farmers might try, they can not grow the eternal food supply of India.
A farmer can produce only a year’s supply which dwindles by the end of the year. Right now the wheat fields of Haryana are golden. Standing amidst the swaying wheat stalks, you can feel the silence punctuated by the rustle of air on their head.
The entire experience can be exhilarating for a city dweller. It equals a session of meditation. Haryana is mostly rural with huge portions of its population aspiring urban facilities.
In some districts they get urban facilities fast and in most, they do not. Karnal, where I went thanks to my friend Jagveer Sandhu has typical Haryana-Punjab characteristics. The wheat fields are endless. Ripe wheat stalks reflecting the sun make dazzling sight.
Jagveer lives in Gharaunda, a village where hundreds of cars, small firearms announce status in the local community where everyone is a farmer. Every family takes out the buffaloes in the morning to the field where they are fed routine cattle feed of hay, salt, dried mustard cakes etc.
In the evening, farmers return with day’s harvest gleaming in golden piles in trailers. Gharaunda could have been a happy village, but it is not. Hundreds of cars might have come, but motorable roads are nowhere in the village. After a day’s bike ride in the fields, I returned with a exhausting body ache thanks to the water-filled ditches in the muddy tracts.
There is a railway crossing in the village which connects Delhi with Chandigarh. Tankers with petrochemical products use the same route to reach Delhi and beyond from Panipat refinery. It is a rather busy railway line. But there is no arrangement to create an alternate path for villagers to avoid the railway crossing. The crossing often creates huge traffic congestion that look monstrous in absence of black-topped roads.
The other problem is perennial. Earlier, agriculture was a low stress self-employment. You produced and sold in the nearby market and forgot the rest. Today, you have to produce with profit at succeeding years. Unless you do so, you end up in a loss-making unattractive venture. Such profiteering is not possible without sufficient government subsidies.
Needless to say, subsidies do not find takers in the government these days. As a result, farmers of Gharaunda are pretty much on their own. They purchase huge machines to sort wheat, rice and tug the produce to market. The lonely battle tires them out. Some farmers of Gharaunda have already given up. Instead of wheat, they are making money from sand. Haryana has a large sand mafia thriving on the construction lobby in Delhi and its surrounding areas.
The mafia mines sand illegally and trucks them away to rich plains of Haryana. Sand mafia of Haryana uses fertile fields of Gharaunda among others to store their sand dunes till orders arrive for their transportation. Jagveer took me to the dunes where they are guarded by armed men. One such man asked me to take his photograph. He posed happily with his gun and two friends.
Gharaunda is also sitting next to the biggest election-time issue between Punjab and Haryana. The village is bordered by the dried tracts of Satluj-Yamuna Link Canal. Politicians in Haryana promise to get Satluj’s water into the Yamuna canal that flows nearby. But keeping this promise is not easy as the Link has dried up and is now covered by significant vegetation in certain stretches.
Gharaunda has comfort. But its future is unstable. Farmers here do not know if their fields will yield gold for coming years or not. It is this uncertainty that is producing social problems. Already strains of this anxiety can be seen all over the village.There are more wine shops per head here than there should be.
People here want better transportation, subsidies for agri sector, assurances against natural threats to agri products, better law and order, and security for small land holders. But none of these are forthcoming. As a result, Gharaunda is also under the shade of growing urban real estate lobby of Delhi-Gurgaon.
Farmers of Haryana are giving up agriculture as they feel, agriculture does not guarantee stable future for themselves or their children. What will happen at the long run is not known. Once this land is sold for highrises, where will the golden wheat come from? Will we import wheat and rice?
These are not Gharaunda’s concerns. These are also the greater questions of the development process post-Nandigram that is also going to polls this summer. In the acrimonious political exchange, reality of the country is lost. But the truth is, this election, voters will also spell out the model of development they want. It is upto the political class to listen to the pulse rate of development.