For Agrarian Awakening

Despite agriculture being the mainstay of a huge majority of people for livelihood across the country, there has been a sustained lackadaisical and callous attitude towards the sector, with different political parties hardly having to say anything meaningful on the issue in their manifestos – quite like when it comes to education imperatives. Even the alarming suicide rate among farmers due to debt and penury has failed to cause a jerk in the political conscience of the country. The situation in Assam is no different. In fact, there has been a downward spiral rather. As this newspaper reported on Monday, it is the acute shortage of manpower that has hit the sector quite hard. Things are so disconcerting and disgraceful in the agriculture department that just one official is encumbered with the monitoring of four to five schemes while for each scheme there should be at least one in charge for the right pace and precision. This state of affairs has the obvious consequence of the schemes in place not getting justice, which means the people who need to benefit from such schemes – the rural populace, mostly poor and backward – are being deprived of justice. But, by and large, this has been a salient feature of this ‘welfare’ democratic nation-state too.

The acuteness of the problem is reflected by the fact that while the department has as many as five sanctioned posts of additional directors, not even one is being currently manned. This, mind you, is the situation at the helm. Move down and you have the situation worsening: 11 of the 16 sanctioned posts of joint directors, 18 of the 53 posts of deputy directors, 13 of the 103 posts of assistant directors, 90 of the 165 posts of sub-divisional agricultural officers, 13 of the 138 senior agricultural officers, 130 of the 449 agricultural development officers, and 1,730 of the 2,884 posts of village-level extension workers are all vacant. These figures tell one a story of apathy and indifference when it comes to the government’s approach to agriculture imperatives and priorities. What has stopped the government from filling up these posts? Fund crunch? Or the court cases preventing recruitment? If one supposes both are true, then the question is what sort of serious initiative the government has worked upon to negotiate the factors that have come in the way of recruitment so that the important posts lying vacant are filled up and the schemes announced are taken to their logical conclusion – to aid of the distressed farming community? These are serious questions that the vernacular media in the State in particular ought to raise instead of dwelling on sensational and negative stories.

In fact, the State agriculture department needs to have two full-fledged directors at the helm of affairs – one each for agriculture, as understood in the usual sense, and horticulture, but while horticulture has an in-charge director, agriculture has an IAS officer at the top who is a generalist and not from any of the faculties of agriculture. In other words, there is a lack of leadership of the kind needed at the top for the vast domain of agriculture to happen in the real sense and benefit the people concerned – all farmers whose chief source of sustenance is agriculture. The Sarbananda Sonowal government cannot afford to ignore the malady any more if it is really interested in inclusive development. Priorities can no longer remain misplaced, nor will any excuses do now.