Ruined Farms, Empty Villages: The Pain of Forced Distress Migration
N. Singh · ·3 min read
Translated from the original Hindi · मूल हिंदी लेख पढ़ें
Sit at any village chaupal [community gathering space] with an elder and ask him a straightforward question: “Baba, do you want your son or grandson to farm as well?”
Nine out of ten elders will take a deep breath and say: “No, son! Whatever we suffered, we suffered; we do not want our next generation to ruin their lives in this mud and debt as well. We will send him to the city, even if he works as a peon at some shop, but he must not farm!”
This sentence is not merely the pain of an old man; it is the death certificate of India’s rural society!
In a country whose identity has been that of an ‘agrarian’ nation, where the adage ‘Uttam kheti, madhyam baan, nikrisht chaakri, bheekh nidaan’ [farming is best, trade is middling, service is lowly, and begging is the worst resort] has echoed for centuries, today farming in that very country has been reduced to the most degraded and humiliating profession.
Migration: A Dream of Development or the Sting of Compulsion?
In the seventh chapter of their book ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’ [Ruined Farms, Empty Villages], authors N. Singh and Vimla Singh present a heart-wrenching sociological analysis of this rural displacement.
Today, the surge of youth rushing from the villages of Bihar, Purvanchal [eastern Uttar Pradesh], Bundelkhand, Odisha, and Rajasthan towards Mumbai, Delhi, Surat, and Ludhiana is not chasing some grand dream. It is fleeing to save its life from rural starvation and the unbearable losses of agriculture.
Diesel prices are skyrocketing, fertilisers are black-marketed, pesticides turn out to be spurious, electricity never arrives on time, and when the crop is ready, stray cattle or unseasonal hailstorms swallow it whole. When the farmer takes whatever little harvest remains to the mandi [wholesale agricultural market], the arhatiya [commission agent] buys it for a pittance.
These continuous losses have broken the farmer so completely that he is ready to lock up his ancestral home and sweat it out for 12 hours a day in a dark 10-by-10 shanty.
A Bitter Truth from the Book
“Villages are now turning merely into cremation grounds and old age homes. When the youth power leaves the village, only helplessness and illness are left behind. Urban policy-makers tout this as ‘urbanisation’ and an indicator of economic growth. But this is not urbanisation; rather, it is a capitalist conspiracy to forcibly strangle the rural economy to manufacture cheap, vulnerable labour for the metropolises.”
— ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’ (Chapter 7)
What Is the Real Solution?
- Making farming a dignified and profitable profession: Prices of agricultural produce must be linked to the Consumer Price Index, so that the farmer’s purchasing power remains on par with industrialists and government employees.
- Rural industrialisation: Agro-based cottage industries, organic fertiliser units, and solar power parks should be set up within the villages themselves, so that rural youth get dignified employment within a 5-kilometre radius of their homes.
- A permanent solution to the stray cattle problem: Instead of mere paper gaushalas [cow shelters], cow sanctuaries should be established at the gram panchayat [village council] level, and a mandatory government procurement policy for cow dung and urine should be implemented.
A Question Worth Contemplating (The Message of the Book)
If villages become empty and agriculture falls entirely into the hands of corporate companies, will this country’s democracy and food remain secure? This chapter of the book ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’ compels every conscientious citizen to think.
The emptying of villages is not merely a demographic shift; it is the destruction of that culture, collective belonging, and self-reliance that kept India alive through famines and disasters for thousands of years.