Though the government is vehemently defending removing restrictions on the purchase of farm land by amending the Karnataka Land Reforms Act, 1961 through an ordinance, a large number of farmers from across the State have given a thumbs down to the amendment, according to a survey.
The farmers’ resentment against drastic changes to the Act has been brought to light by an independent survey steered by former Karnataka Agricultural Prices Commission (KAPC) chairman Prakash Kammaradi. The survey picked 1,500 farmers through a random selection process from a base of 5,000 farmers identified from across the State.
A total of 59.2% of the farmers who responded to the survey said that changes brought about through an ordinance were “not acceptable”. They also expressed resentment towards the earlier amendments to the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Act.
Interestingly, a micro-level feedback has shown that the BJP’s strong electoral constituencies making up Bombay Karnataka, the central and coastal belts, as well as the Lingayat and Brahmin communities, too were opposed to the amendments.
“The survey was conducted through telephonic conversation with farmers. The salient features of all the above issues were explained to them by the caller before they were asked a set of questions,” said Dr. Kammaradi. “The interviewers took an average of 30 to 45 minutes to interact with each farmer.”
An interesting feature of the survey is that it not only covered the entire State, but also sub-divided the State into five different zones — Old Mysore (Mysuru, Bengaluru, Mandya, Kolar, Ramanagaram, Chamarajanagar, and Chickballapur districts), Malnad (Shivamogga, Chikkamagaluru, Hassan, Kodagu, and Uttara Kannada), Coastal Karnataka (Udupi and Dakshina Kannada), Central Karnataka (Chitradurga, Davangere, Gadag, and Haveri), Bombay Karnataka (Belagavi, Dharwad, Vijayapura, and Bagalkot), and Kalyana Karnataka (Bidar, Kalaburagi, Raichur, Ballari, Yadgir, and Koppal).
Apart from this, farmers were also classified based on their education, age, size of land holding, and caste.
While 55.3% of the farmers from the Central Karnataka region opposed the amendments, a whopping 72.6% from the Bombay Karnataka region and 54.1% from the Malnad and coastal regions expressed resentment over the changes. The percentages in Old Mysore and Kalyana Karnataka were 70% and 48.1%, respectively.
Dr. Kammaradi said a detailed survey report would be made available to the public by the end of this month.
The survey was sponsored by the Bengaluru-based Pritvi Trust, which is involved in R&D and policy advocacy in agriculture with the help about 60 PG students from the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bengaluru, Maharaja Institute of Technology, Mysuru, Department of Dairy Technology, Bengaluru, and several NGOs. Two private firms — iDMine Technologies Ltd. and DataWorx Ltd. — rendered voluntary service in analysing the data.
