Who Is a Real Farmer? The Defining Question Behind Rural Agrarian Crisis

Consider two individuals.

The first person lives in an air-conditioned flat in a posh locality of Delhi, Mumbai, or Lucknow. He works for a major multinational company or is a prominent businessman. Registered in his name in the village are 15 bighas of ancestral land, on which he has not set foot in the last 20 years.

The second person toils and bakes in the soil of that very village. He wakes at four in the morning, irrigates the fields barefoot in the bone-chilling cold, heaves bags of fertiliser on his shoulders, and when the crop is harvested, hands over half the grain to the landowner, feeding his family on the remaining half. In his own name, he does not own even a dhur (a traditional land unit measuring a fraction of a bigha) of land.

Now, when the government announces the Kisan Samman Nidhi, crop insurance compensation, or a bank loan waiver, who receives that money?

That money goes into the first person’s account, because his name is entered in the official khatauni (land tenure register)! And that second person, who spent the prime of his youth nurturing the fields, is not even acknowledged as a ‘farmer’ in any government office.

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The Paper Owner versus the Farmer of Sweat

This is precisely the bitter question that authors N. Singh (Nathuni Singh ‘Kodanna’) and Vimla Singh raise with unflinching candour in the very first chapter of their ground-level research work, ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’ (Ravaged Agriculture, Desolate Villages).

India’s greatest policy hypocrisy is that even 78 years after independence, we do not possess an honest criterion to determine ‘who is a farmer?’

In the eyes of the government machinery, a farmer is solely someone who holds legal documentation of land ownership. But the reality is that crores of India’s marginal, small, and landless labourers actually cultivate land through ‘bataidari’ (sharecropping) or on lease. When floods strike or drought descends, it is the labour of the bataidar (sharecropper) that drowns, the investment of the bataidar that is ruined; yet the cheque for government compensation goes to that absentee landlord sitting in the city, monitoring the rates of the stock market.

This double blow has utterly broken the real producer in the village. Banks do not grant him loans because he lacks land papers. Left with no choice, he borrows from the usurious village moneylender at ₹3 to ₹5 per hundred a month (36% to 60% annual interest). And when the harvest fails, it is he who ends up hanging from the noose.

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The Bitter Truth from the Book

Exposing this anomaly in their book, ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’, the author duo writes:

“In India, the word farmer has been draped in an emotional cloak, but in reality, his legal status is utterly wretched. The term ‘farmer’ is also used for those large landowners, contractors, and non-agricultural wealthy elites whose primary source of income is industry or employment, but who declare their income as ‘agricultural income’ to evade income tax. On the other hand, the one who plies the plough day and night, who wields the khurpi (hand weeding trowel) and spade, is relegated to the category of bataidar, adhiyadar (half-share cultivator), or agricultural labourer. In this manner, 80 per cent of the benefits of government policies never reach those who actually cultivate the soil.”
— ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’ (Chapter 1)

The book further clarifies that National Sample Survey (NSSO) figures themselves testify that over 40% of agricultural households in India do not own adequate land of their own. They break their backs toiling on others’ land, yet in times of crisis, remain completely bereft of policy protection.

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What Is the Real Solution?

If the nation is truly to safeguard food security and salvage the rural economy, we must liberate the definition of a farmer from the clutches of landlordism:

1. Farmer status based on cultivation: A farmer’s identity must not be determined by documents in the khatauni, but by the actual cultivation of the land (Actual Cultivator Status). In every state, there must be transparent registration of bataidars and tenant cultivators at the gram panchayat (village council) level.
2. Insurance and subsidies directly to the cultivator: Subsidies on seeds and fertilisers, crop insurance claims, and government relief funds must go directly into the bank account of the person who was cultivating the crops in the field during that season.
3. Guarantee of institutional credit: To provide low-interest crop loans to landless cultivators, the Kisan Credit Card (KCC) must be uncoupled from land ownership and linked to a ‘Crop Cultivation Agreement’.
4. Farming must not be an avenue for tax evasion: Tax-free income declared in the name of farming by corporates and industrialists amassing billions from non-agricultural businesses must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny, so that the name of agriculture does not remain merely a shield for the rich.

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A Question for Reflection (The Book’s Message)

When a soldier fights on the frontier, honour is bestowed upon that jawan (soldier) in uniform who takes the bullet, not upon the contractor who stitched the uniform. Why then, in the matter of growing food grains in the field, is that labourer treated as an alien outsider—the one who toils with blood and sweat beneath the blazing sun?

Will the parliament of independent India ever enact a law that can secure for the one who drives the plough his true self-respect and rights? To understand this fundamental and unsettling truth, you must read this first chapter of the book ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’.