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By Root 1416 0

Vamsi Vakulabharanam, has identified and explained the politics of this contradictory, seemingly nonsensical set of facts. The answer, he writes, lies in the credit system. The moneylenders demand that cotton be planted with their capital because cotton is inedible, so during times of crisis, producers cannot “steal,” that is eat, it. Moneylenders essentially give advances on crops, then receive the harvest. If a farm family is dying of hunger and their crop is grain, chances are they will eat the collateral crop to stay alive, rather than give it to the moneylender. Cotton avoids that problem. Thus, even when food crops, like grains, command higher prices, they carry greater risks for the moneylenders. Cotton is the moneylenders’ biological insurance; they steer farmers away from food crops, even if the potential for profits is higher, because only cotton is guaranteed collateral. Using this insight, Vakulabharanam shows that since 1980, farmers in Telangana have moved away from planting coarse grains, like jowar, barley, and millet, toward growing cotton, even as the price signal should have them doing the opposite.

This shift has coincided with the neoliberal reforms that removed from agriculture many legal protections and government subsidies—including public credit and public investment in irrigation.42 In response to the relative withdrawal of the state, farmers took on more expenses themselves and, in turn, had to raise capital wherever they could—that meant from moneylenders. The more farmers turned to private moneylenders, the more they were under pressure to grow more cotton. And the more cotton they grew, the lower its price sank.

Thus, Telangana farmers become trapped in a downward economic cycle: they need expensive inputs and capital to produce a crop that drops in value even as they invest more heavily in it. And the central equipment—especially as climate change makes the region drier, due to extreme weather and frequent drought—are the well and irrigation systems. So, the farmers borrow. Vakulabharanam calls it “immiserizing growth”—agricultural output rises but incomes sink. Others have described the same set of contradictions as “modern poverty” or a form of “development-induced scarcity.”43

Irrigating Corruption

Recent mismanagement and political meddling have compounded the climate-change-driven water problem in Andhra Pradesh. In particular, the neglect of the traditional water-management system is due to the interventions of N. T. Rama Rao. A Telugu-speaking film star, N. T. Rao, as he was known, scripted himself into the political scene by founding the Telugu Desam Party, a Telangana regionalist party that sought greater development in northern Andhra Pradesh and governed throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s. He made his charismatic appeals directly to the people with a populist mix of ideas from the Left and Right.

On the one hand, he fought vigorously against the Naxalites, presiding over the creation of the Greyhounds—those police counterinsurgency forces. On the other hand, he did much to disrupt old power groups and deliver services to the popular classes of the region. As part of this attack on established and inherited privilege, he abolished the feudal munasob and karanam system in which local dignitaries inherited tax-collection, water-management, and irrigation maintenance jobs—all opportunities to shake down the farmer. The film star did away with these village satraps—a bit of justice but also just one more layer of political interference between himself and the masses—but, unfortunately, nothing better fully replaced them. Some village committees, raitu sangam, were organized but not funded. The transition to a different, more democratic system of water management remained incomplete and disorganized, so local irrigation has suffered.

Corruption is also a problem affecting water management. In the village of Patagvada, a few kilometers down the road from Jaamni, across the Big Stream and up a small hill, the people are in thrall to the Congress Party. The reasons for that