Podcast | All You Need To Know - Do Farm Loan Waivers Work?

If you want to see an Indian farmer on screen, tough luck. You might have to buy a ticket to an international film festival. The farmer has all but disappeared from the mainstream Hindi film industry, the same industry which gave us Mother India, Do Bigha Zameen, and Upkar. While smaller films focussing on the plight of the Indian farmer have been made (and feted elsewhere), you are unlikely to know of them.

They barely get a wide release, and the entertainment media do not want to touch them - the Indian farmer and his stories simply do not appeal to the candyfloss imagination that Bollywood caters to. How can one have an item number shot in Monaco in a story about a farmer in Vidarbha?

The rural landscape itself seems to have vanished from the stories we tell on celluloid. Can you think of one big 'Bollywood' film in recent times that has featured a big star and focussed on the lives of rural Indians? There was Lagaan, but cricket was its hook. There was Kadvi Hawa last year, but did you watch it? Peepli Live, in recent memory, came closest to addressing the issues of the farmer to a mainstream audience largely due to it being an Aamir Khan production.

In this 2010 film by Anusha Rizvi, Natha, a farmer, is encouraged by his own brother to commit suicide so his family could get a loan waiver and financial compensation after his death. The news of his impending suicide somehow attracts media attention, and reporters, OB vans and all, descend upon his village to capture the drama. While Natha, now obligated to kill himself, clearly does not want to, and runs away, even as another villager away from the spotlight Hori, who digs dirt for a living, dies.

The seen and unseen stories of Natha and Hori play out in the real world in similar ways - the inability of farmers to pay off debts and therefore resorting to suicides is a narrative we hear all too loudly ahead of any election, but the underlying reasons - the unseen - of a mental health epidemic in rural India, of poor agrarian reforms, of rising input costs and diminishing returns, of fragmented land holding, are barely ever spoken of.

The plight of the farmer, though, finds itself in centre stage in the run up to any election in India. Politicians of every stripe make promises of farm loan waivers ahead of every election. But barely heard are promises to usher in long term agrarian reforms.

Farm loan waivers are like a unicorn - it is the promise of the magical that hides the realities of the practical. They are also like Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame. Loans waived for now... but what next? And how do they impact the larger economy? These are the questions we will address as we dig deeper into the issue of farm loan waivers.