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Safety nets put up at Mumbai’s Mantralaya after farmers attempt suicide, govt under fire

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The BJP govt has failed to effectively tackle the farm crisis. Putting up safety nets seems just another way to protect itself, rather than the farmers.

Mumbai: On 28 January, 84-year-old Dharma Patil died at a Mumbai hospital six days after he consumed poison at the Maharashtra government’s main administrative building –Mantralaya. Patil was distraught over inadequate compensation given to him for his plot of land, which had been acquired by the state for a solar power project.

Since then, there have been two other incidents of individuals trying to use the Mantralaya premises to attempt suicide, putting the Devendra Fadnavis government in damage control mode.

A week later, the government set up a safety net to cover the open space on the first floor of the seven-storey secretariat to avoid any more suicide attempts.

Safety nets in the Mantralaya

However, the move has opened the BJP government up to more criticism, not just from the opposition, but its own ally, the Shiv Sena. The safety nets have become symbolic of how the government has tackled the entire farmer crisis, with less action and more tamasha.

The Shiv Sena took on the government in its mouthpiece Saamana, commenting on the futility of putting up a nylon safety net, and taunting the government for forgetting that Dharma Patil consumed poison and never jumped to his death.

The Congress as well as the NCP have been equally vocal in their criticism, saying that the government is trying to ignore the real issue, and has turned Mantralaya into a circus.

Of waivers and rising suicides

Let’s examine the facts. Last year, Chief Minister Fadnavis announced a historic farm loan waiver of over Rs 34,000 crore. But that has turned out to be full of caveats.

Ninety lakh farmers were supposed to benefit from the farm loan waiver, but only 56 lakh farmers were able to apply for it. The upper limit of Rs 1.5 lakh ensured that the ones who really needed this benefit were being left out of its ambit.

The Chief Minister told ThePrint in November that most of the waiver will be disbursed by the end of 2017. It’s coming to the end of February, and not even 50 per cent of the waiver is through.

To top it all, ever since the BJP came into power in the state, the number of suicides have gone up, as admitted by Nana Patole, a BJP MP who resigned his seat and joined the Congress. According to one media report, the state recorded 2,917 suicides in 2017, of which 60 per cent of the deaths were after the loan waiver was announced.

The state says it is wrong to connect the waiver to the suicides, and attributes most of the deaths to crop failure. If that be the case, things are likely to get worse. Recent hailstorms in the state have led to massive crop destruction, with the state demanding Rs 200 crore from the Centre to help the affected farmers.

One thing is clear. The agrarian distress is Fadnavis’s biggest problem, and given the response given by disgruntled Saurashtra farmers to the BJP in the assembly elections in neighbouring Gujarat, the CM knows this could become his nemesis too.

In this scenario, it seems the safety net at the Mantralaya might be a poor way to demonstrate that the government knows how to handle the crisis. All that the netting ensures is that the Mantralaya will not bear witness to the sheer desperation of farmers forced to take the extreme step.

Safety nets in the Mantralaya

But in reality, it fails to protect the ones who need the real safety net – the farmers.

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