The BRS is baffled by the agrarian dissent it is facing in its once strong rural base as it seeks to come back to power for the third time since the formation of Telangana as a state.
Not long ago Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao prided himself for running a pro-farmer government and even coined the slogan “Ab Ki Baar Kisaan Sarkar” when he transformed the BRS from TRS, seeking the expansion of the party at the national level but now finds the party wobbling in quite few districts.
The BRS, which had thought to ride home the success of KCR’s pioneering welfare schemes like Rythu Bandhu and Ryathu Bima Schemes for farmers and irrigation projects, no longer finds the ground firm under its feet.
The Chief Minister came up with some truly innovative schemes for the farming community and reaped the benefits in 2018 when he was voted back to office a second time. However, the faulty implementation of each scheme has led to large scale disgruntlement.
Take for instance Rythu Bandhu, the agriculture investment support scheme of Telangana government under which farmers get Rs 10,000 per acre in two instalments.
However, the tenant farmers are excluded from the scheme. There are some 22 lakh tenant farmers among 60 lakh farmers in Telangana, who do not get any kind of help from the state government like subsidized seeds or fertilisers or even loans from banks and thus are unhappy with the BRS.
Moreover, another seed of discontent was sown over Dharani portal, an integrated land records management system which KCR is immensely proud of but brought hardship for those requiring rectification in land records.
According to Akunuri Murali, a retired IAS officer and convenor of the Social Democratic Forum, the Dharani is nothing but data entry operations with mistakes galore.
“With Dharani the entire local land administration system in villages has been done away with and for every rectification you need to approach the collector who is the only one who can log in to the system,” pointed out Murali.
The piling up of complaints over Dharani without an effective grievance redressal system has been the bane for the BRS.
In addition, Telangana is the only state in the entry country which does not have a crop insurance scheme.
States like Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal had withdrawn from the Centre’s Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana and opted for an alternate crop insurance scheme.
But Telangana after ditching the Central scheme did not go for its own comprehensive crop insurance scheme to protect farmers. Instead whenever crops were damaged by unseasonal rains or hailstorm, the Chief Minister arbitrarily announced Rs 10,000 per acre as compensation.
The Congress, on the other hand, has obviously done its homework and targeted the Chief Minister and his party for batting only for rich farmers and neglecting the small and marginal farmers, Dalits and tribal population.
Tagging KCR as feudal, it promised a “Prajalu” (of the masses) government instead of the current Doralu (feudal) government. The BRS, on the other hand, hopes to scrape through with reduced margins.