Pawar keen to lead agrarian reforms

Rural women in nine-yard saris routinely sail down supermarket aisles and up to ATMs in the Baramati area of western Maharashtra. Now Sharad Pawar, Baramati's long-time MP and India's new Minister for Agriculture and Food, has a dream. He wants to replicate that rural revolution across the country.

But now he finds himself stuck in the wrong political basket. The reforms he would like to aggressively push in India's vast agricultural sector are sure to meet a wall of resistance from the Left parties. They want him to focus instead on providing subsidised food to the rural poor.

That is not the only bind Pawar finds himself in. Now that he is a relatively powerless member of a coalition over which Sonia Gandhi presides, the ghost of time past is sure to haunt him. Pawar had split the Congress before the '99 Lok Sabha elections, arguing then that the nation would not accept Sonia as prime minister.

Several political observers, including Congress leaders from Maharashtra, say privately that Pawar is sure to be squee-zed administratively – if not squashed politically.

So even if the Left were to countenance his cherished reforms agenda, the Congress could not. "The last thing Sonia would want is for Pawar to emerge with the sort of public acclaim that Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram earned as Finance Minister," says a senior Congress MP.

Pawar's political survival skills then will be on test even more so than his dexterity at pushing reforms past the Left. Nor is time on his side, for the Maharashtra assembly elections are due in four months.

Pawar refuses to be drawn by repeated questions on his relationship with Sonia. "I am in a separate party," he told Gulf News. "You should ask the Congress." As for the stability of the coalition, he suggests asking the prime minister about that.

He acknowledges that anti-incumbency will have some impact against the Congress-NCP regime in Maharashtra but insists that the Telgi stamp paper scandal will not dent the coalition's image.

Indeed, he holds that "Telgi has boomeranged on BJP. Mr Bhujbal has managed to explain to people in various meetings what happened". Chhagan Bhujbal is the NCP leader who was named in the scandal.

Although Pawar prefers to talk of his portfolios, he turns quickly to the problems of his constituency – the sugar industry of Maharashtra.

Sixty of the state's 160 sugar mills could not operate last year, he says, and he has been told that the number could be much higher this year.

He makes sure to point out that the two ministries – Agriculture and Food, along with the several related departments – have been combined for the first time since the days of such heavyweights of the '70s as Jagjivan Ram and C. Subramaniam.

They fashioned India's green revolution but Pawar wants to lead the next quantum leap. India's yield of wheat is the second highest in the world and it ranks first or second in sugar, horticulture and milk output, he says. So the challenge now is to increase the yield per hectare.

He says he would like to make production competitive and cost-efficient, remove pricing, export and marketing restrictions, and to focus on organic foods - since they have a huge market in the West.

All of this of course would require mechanisation and integrated holdings, but the Left parties would pull down the government before allowing rural unemployment to rise or land ceiling to end.

So Pawar focuses on rural credit to finance modernisation by small farmers, pointing out that the Common Minimum Programme promises to double agricultural credit in three years.

He acknowledges, however, that he has his work cut out to make that happen. As he points out with a grin, banks would rather get deposits from small farmers than lend to them.