Did Bihar vote for real issues? Have Biharis won or lost?

In the poor agrarian state of Bihar, agriculture and the plight of farmers was not quite the hot election issue that it deserved to become. The focus was more on employment by the Government in the face of unremunerative farming in the state.

For a variety of reasons, largely because of the Centre bulldozing farm laws to ensure market forces to determine prices of agriculture products, Punjab this year cracked down on rice from Bihar and UP being transported to Punjab for procurement at MSP.

Bihar had largely done away with state procurement of paddy and wheat in 2006—though the system of procurement by panchayat samitis remained on paper. Such procurement was often delayed for months after harvesting and payments were also made later. This forced farmers in Bihar to sell their produce of paddy, wheat, maize and fruits like bananas and litchi to middlemen.

In a report in The Wire, asked why farmers’ plight doesn’t become a main election issue, Ramashish Rai, president of the Rashtriya Kisan Sabha that operates both in Bihar and UP, says that the irony of Bihar is that elections in the state are fought on caste lines.

“Although unemployment has emerged as a key issue in the ongoing state elections, the real issues often take a back seat,” he added.

B.N. Singh, president of the Small Farmers Association of Bihar’s Vaishali confirms that farmers in Bihar are forced to sell rice at rates ranging from Rs 800 to Rs 1100 per quintal to traders and middlemen in the absence of a procurement system in place.

In Punjab, the Minimum Support Price for rice is between Rs 1868 and Rs 1888, he pointed out. And middlemen found it profitable to pay Rs 150 to Rs 200 as transportation cost, retain a similar amount as their margin and sell the rice to middlemen in Punjab between Rs 1,300 to Rs 1400. The rice is then sold to state agencies in mandis at MSP and the middlemen pocket the profit.

“Koi puchne nahi aata jab hamari fasal tayaar ho jati hai. Kisan kya kare phir? Majboori main bichaulie ko bechna parta hai (No one cares when our produce is ready. Where should a farmer go, then? The helplessness forces us to sell our produce to middlemen),” said Singh in the report in The Wire.

So, what were the real issues that political parties should have addressed ? The Left parties, notably the CPI(ML), raised some of these issues and appear to have drawn some attention and support. An incomplete listing shows where Bihar stands.

1. Bihar had set this year its wheat procurement target at 700,000 tons. But the actual procurement was less than 1% at 5000 tons. There were 9,000 wheat procurement centres in the state in 2015-16 but the number came down to 1,619 in 2019-20.

2. Bihar issued just 1.1 million job cards under MGNREGA this year, gave work to only 2,132 job card holders and that too for seven days each on an average as against the provision of 100 days. This in a state with a population of 130 million.

3. As many as 36% of the children in the state do not attend school; 62% of those who do, drop out after primary school. The literacy rate at 61.8% is the lowest.

4. The state has one doctor for a population of 43,777 as against the norm of 1000.

5. The state is officially short of 2,78,602 school teachers.

6. Not a single educational institution in the state figures in the list of top institutes (universities and colleges) in the country.

7. The unemployment rate in the state was a staggering 46.6% in April, 2020 (7.2% in 2017-18). Among the educated unemployed the rate is 17.5%.