Rocking the youngest of his five children in his arms, street vendor
Daata Ram watches his wife tend to two sick cows whose milk once
supplemented their meagre income.
The 66-year-old’s family of seven survives on what he now makes by selling small quantities of puffed rice in Pandra Sikanpur, a one-street, hardscrabble town of 5,000 in Uttar Pradesh.
“I took a loan of Rs 30,000 to buy those cows but I think they are no good now,” says Ram, who uses a fourth of his monthly earnings of Rs5000-6000 to repay the local moneylender.
Across the street from Ram’s thatched hut is the sprawling house of Neeraj Kumar Singh, a well-off sugarcane farmer who lost multiple crops to back-to-back droughts three years ago, and then suffered when farm prices crashed last year.
“It takes two harvesting seasons to recover the loss of one,” says Singh who wants his sons to find jobs outside farming so that their lives wouldn’t be held ransom to the vagaries of nature.
But his four children have found no jobs, and the 60-year-old farmer is angry that he must now divide his 10 acres of cropland to secure their future.
Daata Ram and Singh sit on different points on the country’s income spectrum but, in their collective discontent, the two symbolise the rising pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to deliver on his emotive election vow to bring ‘achhe din’, or good times, to Indians.
The Feb. 1 budget was a chance for Modi to unveil measures that would fulfil his 2014 guarantee of growth and more jobs, a task made all the more tough by his abrupt decision to drain out 86% of all cash in the economy in his fight against illicit wealth.
It’s also a challenge that is urgent, given that Modi has already crossed the halfway point of his tenure.
Read | Budget 2017: Akhilesh says BJP could not fulfil promise of ‘achhe din’
To his admirers, though, Modi has already made great strides – from reinvigorating the ossified hand of a government system that hobbled progress to biting the bullet on tough decisions needed to pull India’s economy out of a dangerous morass.
Many of his moves on inclusive, accountable governance and a freer hand to bureaucracy have resonated well with Indians tired of a rudderless government mired in corruption scandals and whose indecisiveness had left more than 700 major industry projects in limbo.
Growing economy
Some of that good work is showing.
The country’s annualised retail inflation is below the mid-point of the central bank’s target; public finances are better than before with higher income from taxes, monsoon-sown grain production is the highest in at least 14 years and the economy is more open to business than it has ever been. In its first two years, the government cleared more economic reforms – including deregulating diesel prices, cutting cooking gas subsidy and making it easier for companies to exit business – than in the last five years of the previous government. Millions more have been brought into the country’s banking system and the government has pushed digitisation.
In the latest budget, the government also announced incentives to labour-intensive sectors such as clothing and leather along with spending more on projects like roads, railways, low-cost housing and irrigation.
Economic growth hasn’t created enough jobs because of lack of investment, income inequality has grown, farm distress has soared and the cash ban has only worsened the economic outlook in the immediate term. Credit to industry remains flat and, despite higher farm credit target, disbursement levels have dipped as banks seek to avoid bad loans.
Even for some Modi fans like Rambir Rathi, a sugarcane farmer in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat, the dream of “achhe din” is coming unstruck.
“I voted for Modi. Farmers like us were promised Rs 500 for a quintal of sugarcane instead of the Rs 315 we were receiving then. I believed in him,” says the father of two.
“They told us our dues would be paid by the sugar mill owners but look what has happened. The rate is the same. Our dues remain unpaid.”
Asked to rate Modi’s governance of more than two years, Rathi gives the prime minister two on 10.
“Do bhi jyada hai. Mann toh nahin karta hai ek bhi dene ko (Even two is too much. I don’t feel like giving him even one),” he says, adding Modi had only done well on dealing with Pakistan.
The 66-year-old’s family of seven survives on what he now makes by selling small quantities of puffed rice in Pandra Sikanpur, a one-street, hardscrabble town of 5,000 in Uttar Pradesh.
“I took a loan of Rs 30,000 to buy those cows but I think they are no good now,” says Ram, who uses a fourth of his monthly earnings of Rs5000-6000 to repay the local moneylender.
Across the street from Ram’s thatched hut is the sprawling house of Neeraj Kumar Singh, a well-off sugarcane farmer who lost multiple crops to back-to-back droughts three years ago, and then suffered when farm prices crashed last year.
“It takes two harvesting seasons to recover the loss of one,” says Singh who wants his sons to find jobs outside farming so that their lives wouldn’t be held ransom to the vagaries of nature.
But his four children have found no jobs, and the 60-year-old farmer is angry that he must now divide his 10 acres of cropland to secure their future.
Daata Ram and Singh sit on different points on the country’s income spectrum but, in their collective discontent, the two symbolise the rising pressure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to deliver on his emotive election vow to bring ‘achhe din’, or good times, to Indians.
The Feb. 1 budget was a chance for Modi to unveil measures that would fulfil his 2014 guarantee of growth and more jobs, a task made all the more tough by his abrupt decision to drain out 86% of all cash in the economy in his fight against illicit wealth.
It’s also a challenge that is urgent, given that Modi has already crossed the halfway point of his tenure.
Read | Budget 2017: Akhilesh says BJP could not fulfil promise of ‘achhe din’
To his admirers, though, Modi has already made great strides – from reinvigorating the ossified hand of a government system that hobbled progress to biting the bullet on tough decisions needed to pull India’s economy out of a dangerous morass.
Many of his moves on inclusive, accountable governance and a freer hand to bureaucracy have resonated well with Indians tired of a rudderless government mired in corruption scandals and whose indecisiveness had left more than 700 major industry projects in limbo.
Rambir Rathi , a Uttar Pradesh farmer at home
(Vipin Kumar/HT PHOTO)
Some of that good work is showing.
The country’s annualised retail inflation is below the mid-point of the central bank’s target; public finances are better than before with higher income from taxes, monsoon-sown grain production is the highest in at least 14 years and the economy is more open to business than it has ever been. In its first two years, the government cleared more economic reforms – including deregulating diesel prices, cutting cooking gas subsidy and making it easier for companies to exit business – than in the last five years of the previous government. Millions more have been brought into the country’s banking system and the government has pushed digitisation.
In the latest budget, the government also announced incentives to labour-intensive sectors such as clothing and leather along with spending more on projects like roads, railways, low-cost housing and irrigation.
“I will give the Prime Minister two out of 10. Even 2 seems two much. I feel like giving only one. Modi’s foreign policy is good . The one point is just for that.”But Modi’s critics say much of this is old wine in a new bottle, minor cosmetic tweaks that haven’t put India on the path of a paradigm shift the prime minister had promised.
Economic growth hasn’t created enough jobs because of lack of investment, income inequality has grown, farm distress has soared and the cash ban has only worsened the economic outlook in the immediate term. Credit to industry remains flat and, despite higher farm credit target, disbursement levels have dipped as banks seek to avoid bad loans.
Even for some Modi fans like Rambir Rathi, a sugarcane farmer in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat, the dream of “achhe din” is coming unstruck.
“I voted for Modi. Farmers like us were promised Rs 500 for a quintal of sugarcane instead of the Rs 315 we were receiving then. I believed in him,” says the father of two.
“They told us our dues would be paid by the sugar mill owners but look what has happened. The rate is the same. Our dues remain unpaid.”
Asked to rate Modi’s governance of more than two years, Rathi gives the prime minister two on 10.
“Do bhi jyada hai. Mann toh nahin karta hai ek bhi dene ko (Even two is too much. I don’t feel like giving him even one),” he says, adding Modi had only done well on dealing with Pakistan.
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