Gujarat’s agriculture sector is sick!

agriculture

Gujarat’s agriculture sector is sick and the farmers have been left in the lurch by the ‘Gujarat Model’

The single biggest problem the farmers are facing is government apathy.

Government has failed to provide proper irrigation facilities to the farmers in distress. It claimed to provide subsidies for drip/sprinkler irrigation, but none of the subsidies offered for implementation of micro irrigation was disbursed.

In 2016, the water scarcity reached epic proportions when 1,000 villages and 8 districts were in a water crisis.

After harvesting the crop, farmers are given no information about the prices their produce can get. The Centre’s eNAM initiative, originally conceived to give pricing power to farmers, is still not functioning in the home state of the PM.

Then, there is the draconian Gujarat Land Acquisition Act, passed by the BJP in 2016, which is an oppressive move to steal land from vulnerable farmers. Some farmers have lost all their land, and are not even farmers anymore.

Government officials often threaten farmers into submission and pay a meagre compensation that is just a fraction of the land value.

The winds of change have begun to blow and Navsarjan is afoot in Gujarat.

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