Farm Loan Waiver: Competitive Populism Or Farmers' Need?

It is going to be the single biggest issue in next year's general election - farmer distress. India's farmers are facing a crisis - a very real one. Very simply, they are just not getting enough money for their produce and they're taking their own lives. On NDTV today, all day, our effort has been to go from state to state to see what's happening on the ground, to hear the voices of farmers, to ask what they want and what they need many of them want farm loans to be waived, and politically this has become a huge row. With the newly elected Congress government in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh waiving farm loans going into thousands of crores, Rahul Gandhi has now dared the Prime Minister to do the same. Many economists argue that loan waivers are a stop gap, they don't benefit the small farmers who borrow from money lenders.