समस्याएँ भारत की

Summary

Samasyāẽ Bhārat Kī (समस्याएँ भारत की, ‘India’s Problems’) is a Hindi-language collection of essays by Sharad Joshi, the founder of Shetkari Sanghatana, translated and compiled from his Marathi and English journalism of 1980–1988 and published by Shetkari Prakashan in 1988. In the rendered pages (covering the first four complete essays and the opening pages of essays five and six), Joshi develops a sustained argument that independent India has merely replaced white English rulers with brown English rulers — a westernised, urban administrative class that perpetuates the same colonial extraction of agricultural surplus that the British practised. The central claim, repeated across essays, is that the poverty of Indian cities and the misery of rural India are both downstream of a single cause: the systematic underpricing of agricultural produce by a state whose instincts and educational formation remain colonial.

In the rendered pages Joshi argues that conventional economics, whether capitalist or socialist in orientation, treats farming as merely a source of raw material and cheap labour for industry, and that this foundational error drives all flawed policy. Essay 2 (‘New Light on the Prevailing Economy’) extends this critique into a macro-economic framework, showing that the Marxist and mainstream development-economics traditions alike treat agriculture as subordinate to industry, thereby legitimising the continued suppression of farm prices. Essay 3 (‘Is India Truly Free?’) historicises the argument, contending that the concept of freedom that animated anti-colonial struggles — associated with figures such as Maharana Pratap and Shivaji — was appropriated by urban nationalists after 1947 and turned into a tool of continued rural subjugation. Joshi argues that the Agricultural Price Commission (established partly on the recommendations of a 1965 committee chaired by T.T. Krishnamachari) is structurally incapable of ensuring remunerative prices because its mandate is to keep urban food prices and industrial wage-costs low, not to protect the farmer.

The opening pages of essay 6 in the rendered chunk turn to the critics of Shetkari Sanghatana, addressing the charge that its farm-price demand is economically illiterate. Joshi counters that the organisation’s positions are not drawn from foreign economists but from the lived experience of millions of Indian farmers, and that Marx himself — who is invoked by the organisation’s left-wing detractors — has yet to receive recognition from the Indian establishment for his analysis of exploitation. The prose throughout is polemical and accessible, addressed explicitly to Hindi-speaking farmers and rural activists rather than to academic economists.

Key points

• In the rendered pages Joshi argues that independent India replaced British colonial rulers with a domestic urban-elite class (‘काले अंग्रेज’) that continues the same extraction of agricultural surplus through price suppression and discriminatory state policy.

• In the rendered pages the structural cause of Indian poverty is identified as systematic underpricing of farm produce: urban poverty, slum growth, and rural distress are presented as effects of this single policy choice.

• In the rendered pages conventional economics — both Marxist and mainstream development-economics — is indicted for treating agriculture as a subordinate input to industry, thereby providing intellectual cover for anti-farmer state policy.

• In the rendered pages essay 3 argues that formal political independence (1947) did not end the colonial relationship between the state and the farmer; the Agricultural Price Commission is described as a colonial-era instrument in a new institutional form.

• In the rendered pages Joshi invokes the moral-historical tradition of armed resistance (Maharana Pratap, Shivaji) to argue that farmer self-assertion is not merely an economic demand but a legitimate continuation of freedom struggle.

• In the rendered pages rainfall uncertainty is cited as causing crop losses of up to 47 per cent over seven years — a loss no insurance scheme can cover — as evidence of the structural vulnerability of dryland farmers.

• In the rendered pages the publisher’s note confirms that essays span 1980–1988 and were originally published in Hindi periodicals including Nayi Duniya (Indore), Mazadur Kisan Niti, and Chatra Kisan Niti.