New Delhi: A daughter of agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan said at a government function on Tuesday (February 13) that India’s farmers cannot be treated as criminals.
Madhura Swaminathan, an economist, was addressing a function at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) held to celebrate the conferment of the Bharat Ratna, which is India’s highest civilian award, to the senior Swaminathan.
She referred to news reports of agitating farmers being prevented from reaching Delhi and said the country’s scientists have to consult the farmers and not treat them like criminals.
“The farmers of Punjab today are marching to Delhi. I believe, according to the newspaper reports, there are jails being prepared for them in Haryana, there are barricades, there are all kinds of things being done to prevent them,” Swaminathan said.
Listen in to Dr Madhura Swaminathan, economist & daughter of Bharat Ratna Prof MS Swaminathan. Says these are farmers and not criminals. @MadhuraFAS #FarmersProtest pic.twitter.com/0vTyNCqcyv
— Sneha Mordani (@snehamordani) February 14, 2024
“These are farmers, they are not criminals,” she continued to say before being applauded by the audience.
“I request all of you, the leading scientists of India … [inaudible] have to talk to our annadatas [a word in some Indian languages used to refer to farmers], we cannot treat them as criminals. We have to find solutions.
“Please, this is my request. I think if we have to continue and honour M.S. Swaminathan, we have to take the farmers with us in whatever strategy we are planning for the future,” Swaminathan concluded her address by saying.
Various farmer groups are participating in a march to Delhi to demand, among other things, floor prices for their crops and debt waivers. Some estimates have pegged the number of participating farmers at nearly one lakh.
Police in Haryana fired tear gas against protesting farmers on Tuesday and police in the capital have barricaded the city using razor wire, concrete blocks and fencing to prevent the farmers from reaching there.
Some farmers have also alleged that the police fired rubber bullets at them.
The developments come days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the Union government was posthumously conferring the Bharat Ratna to M.S. Swaminathan “in recognition of his monumental contributions to our nation in agriculture and farmers’ welfare”.
M.S. Swaminathan is recognised for leading the Green Revolution in India, which saw the adoption of technologies that increased crop yields and alleviated the country’s food scarcity problems.
R.B. Singh, a scientist who was also present at the IARI function and who was part of the Swaminathan Commission that studied farmer distress in the mid-2000s, was cited as saying by NDTV that Indian farmers need a new law on minimum support prices (MSP).
“For farmers to get the right price for their crops, it is necessary to make a new law on MSP in the country to properly implement the recommendations of the commission,” NDTV quoted him as saying.
Singh also told the TV channel that a system recommended by the panel, where MSPs would be fixed at levels at least 50% higher than the cost of producing a crop, “has not been implemented in a uniform manner in the country”.
