Hyderabad: Of the farming community in Telangana, 36 percent are tenant farmers who survive without any government assistance.
Rythu Swarajya Vedika (RSV) a farmers rights organisation, undertook a survey of farming communities across Telangana. While conducting door to door survey, in 34 villages across 20 districts, they learnt that of 7744 farmers, 2753 are cultivating leased land.
This information becomes relavant as according to RSV’s previous report in 2021, 80% of farmer suicides in Telangana are undertaken by tenant farmers. Further, from the time of state formation (the last eight years), RSV has found that 8000 farmers died by suicide.
To simplify it in numbers, there are 22 lakh tenant farmers across the state.
19 percent of the tenant farmers have no land, while 81 percent can stake claim to a very small portion. Tenant farmers on average own 2.3 acres of land while the leased land often amounts to 5.1 acres. Further, the report noted that 9.5% of the tenant farmers are women.
This numbers are worthy of consideration also because Telangna government has taken a clear stand stating that government assistance will be given only to land owning farmers while tenant farmers receive no assistance whatsoever from the state.
The 2011 Land Licensed Cultivators Act requires the government to identify and register actual cultivators and issue them Loan and Other Eligibility Cards (LEC) to access bank loans and other schemes.
However, after 2015, the state government has stopped implementing the Act. The Chief Minister him self declared in the Assembly that it is not possible to register and identify the tenant farmers as they lease land from different land owners each year.
The problem is further compounded by the Central government not including tenant farmers in its flagship PM-KISAN cash support scheme.
As mentioned earlier, out of a total of 7744 farmers surveyed, 2753 farmers (35.6 %) are cultivating leased land. In other words, out of every three farmers, one is a tenant farmer in Telangana.
60.9% farmers are from the Backward Classes (BC), 22.9% are Scheduled Castes (SC) while Scheduled Tribes (STs) contribute to 9.7% of the populace. Only 4.2% and 2.4% of tenant farmers are from Other castes (OCs) and the Muslim community.
Despite government claims that tenant farmers shift from one land to another regularly, the survey found that 73% of them have been working on the same land for three years or more, 39% for five years and 18% for ten years.
97.3% of the surveyed tenant farmers in Telangana did not benefit from the state government’s flagship Rythu Bandhu scheme. Only 10 tenants (0.4%) farmers states that they received their benefits directly.
