REMEMBER Mahendra Singh Tikait? The man who brought New Delhi to a halt in 1988 when he organized a massive rally of farmers on the India Gate lawns and demanded that the government take note of their demands? He is rarely in the news these days. But last year, Tikait appeared again on the cover of Down To Earth, the magazine brought out by the Centre for Science and Environment (1-15 October 2008). He spoke of the crisis facing farmers even today, a full two decades after his impressive rally.

Much has changed in India in the last two decades. One is the way concern for the farmer seems to have fallen off the political agenda, and the pages of newspapers. Go through a week of any major newspaper in India and see how many times you find the words and phrases – farmer, rabi, kharif, rain-fed, rural indebtedness, fractured land-holdings, scarcity of seeds, procurement price. I would guess that in an average week these words would be hard to find.

Their absence tells a story – not just of the neglect by the media of a sector that concerns the majority of people in this country, but the direction the Indian media has chosen to take. From a time when the media understood its ‘role’ in India as one of recording all developments and reporting as much of the news as possible – including events that were not particularly exciting like crop failures – we now have a situation where the media has chosen to ignore a whole slew of issues and events, treating them as non-news.

Indeed, the problem lies in the very definition of ‘news’ today. Textbook definitions have been thrown out to make way for new definitions. ‘News’ is what sells your product. ‘News’ is what your reader wants to read. Hence, if your reader is urban and middle class, then the ‘news’ that will be given space and prominence is something that must interest this type of reader. For instance, Amitabh Bachchan being hospitalized will get more column space than the floods in Bihar that displaced 25 lakh people.

Similarly, every tremor in the stock exchange automatically merits front page because in the perception of those who run the media, this part of the economy is what their readers are interested in. But a drought or a flood that wipes out the livelihood of thousands of farmers gets a passing mention but not the prominence. The decision to emphasize an issue or not is also governed by the perception of what readers want.

 

A study of the coverage of any issue – labour, poverty, women, environment, agriculture – exposes the nature of this new news dharma. Regardless of the specific subject, whether the media addresses these issues with any degree of seriousness, trivializes them, ignores them, or distorts them indicates where the media is coming from.

It would be a generalization to say that there is no reporting on the agrarian crisis. If you look hard, you find the stories. They are sporadic. But this is what happens to a whole range of social issues. They come into focus when there is an event and then disappear. Thus, when farmers commit suicide in large numbers, the news is reported. In fact, through 2006, most newspapers in Maharashtra did report these suicides. But there is little to link these individual stories to the larger crisis facing agriculture in parts of Maharashtra and the rest of India.

So the absence of reporting on an issue like the agrarian crisis reflects directly on the dramatic changes that have taken place in the media in the last two decades. These changes – as seen in the redefinition of news – are the result of the altered direction of the economy in the early 1990s, the growing profitability of the media coinciding with the growth of consumer products and advertising, and the introduction of satellite television and the 24-hour news channels. The Indian media today shows little resemblance to what existed in the first four decades after Independence.

For instance, in the 1960s and 1970s, so-called ‘developmental’ reporting was an accepted component of mainstream media. Often, this consisted of no more than rewriting press releases issued by the Press and Information Bureau. Still, at least there was some news about an important sector of the economy. Sometimes, newspapers initiated their own investigations into a particular problem and as a result there would be reports through which farmers’ voices would be heard.

 

Some newspapers had dedicated ‘agriculture’ correspondents whose job it was to report on issues concerning farming, new technology and other related subjects. The performance of such dedicated reporters was patchy and would also often get reduced to reporting on what various agricultural ministers said, or reporting on meetings and seminars on agriculture, or agricultural research and the introduction of new technology, and so on. A picture of the life of a person dependent on agriculture did not necessarily convey itself to readers unless there was a crisis, like a drought, or a flood that wiped out crops and placed farmers in distress. But agriculture and farmers were a legitimate component of the newscape.Today, practically no newspaper has a correspondent with that definition.

Farmers’ voices also broke through to the news pages when farmers’ organizations or political parties mobilized on the question of procurement prices. Inevitably there would be dharnas, roadblocks, marches and big demonstrations like the one organized by Tikait. The media just could not ignore such mass mobilization. Agrarian issues were a part of politics and therefore reflected in the media.

One cannot forget that Doordarshan also regularly featured the agrarian sector through programmes like Krishi Darshan. Today, with the spread of satellite and cable television, and the dominance of entertainment in all programming, including news, there is precious little space left for the farmer and his problems.

 

Since the 1990s, the nature of politics has changed drastically as has the direction of the media. The farmers’ parties of the past have disappeared or merged with other political parties. And inevitably, this has affected the coverage of an issue like the agrarian crisis.

When farmers do mobilize, as they have done on the question of diversion of farmlands for industry or SEZs as in Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal and Raigad in Maharashtra, then the media has given them extensive coverage. But the reporting is event-based and does not necessarily result in stories that report other dimensions of the crisis.

For instance, when the so-called ‘referendum’ was held in Raigad in September 2008 in 22 villages that were to be acquired for the SEZ, many farmers were quoted as saying they would not sell out even if they were offered ten million rupees per acre. Unofficially, it was clear that the majority of farmers were against their lands being acquired for the project. But once the referendum was over, there were few follow-up stories on how much these farmers currently earn from their rain-fed lands, how much more they could realistically expect once the long promised waters of a dam begin to flow, whether there was any instance of indebtedness as in Vidarbha, how big the holdings were, had there been any consolidation and so on. A number of these angles would have helped readers understand why farmers are resisting parting with their land and introduced to them the reality of farming in India. But lack of interest and an obsession with events rather than processes ensured that few in the media bothered with this kind of follow-up.

As far as the Vidarbha suicides are concerned, even though local reporters wrote about them, they caught national and political attention only when a prominent journalist, P. Sainath, wrote detailed stories of farmers who had committed suicide and what happened to their families. It was fortuitous that Sainath works with The Hindu, a newspaper that has consistently given space to such issues. As a result, his stories were prominently displayed on the op-ed page and made the necessary impact.

 

The important point to remember here is that it is not only the sincerity of the journalist or the quality of writing and investigation that makes a difference in such issues. It is also placement, and the importance given to such stories by the gatekeepers in the media. There are dozens of good investigative features that are truncated, delayed or simply buried because those who run the media do not consider them important. It is to the credit of the editors of The Hindu that they chose to highlight the issue of farmers’ suicides.

Interestingly, apart from Sainath’s stories, several other editions of The Hindu also follow rural and agrarian issues. The Bangalore edition, for instance, has two pages every week that are devoted to news from the districts. Often these stories reflect the problems that farmers face. Once again, the editorial decision to allocate this kind of space it what ensures that the stories find a place and a prominence.

Both The Hindu and The Indian Express have a page a week on agriculture. Here the stories are often about agricultural technology and success stories about farmers experimenting with new seeds. However limited they might be in their scope, they serve as a useful reminder to the urban reader that there is world out there beyond the multiplexes and shopping malls.

 

At the same time, although political mobilization of farmers on the scale seen in the 1980s is not so evident today, there is considerable work being done by grassroots groups in many of the areas where farmers are facing hardships. As a result of such work, the media is alerted to the problem. For example, men like Kishore Tiwari of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti alerted journalists about the suicides of farmers in Vidarbha. As a result, even newspapers that would normally not give much space to the issue did follow up stories.

The Times of India, for instance, devoted almost a full page on 7 October 2006 and featured Tiwari’s explanation for the suicides: ‘It’s happening primarily among debt-ridden small and marginal farmers facing one or more of these problems: someone sick in the family for a long time, a daughter of marriageable age or just married off, an unemployed son pushing the farmer to get out of agriculture, the shock of sudden crop failure due to floods or a product price drop that dramatically alters his life for the worse’, the story stated. Brief as is this explanation, it does touch on the main issues behind the Vidarbha suicides.

The media does not always acknowledge that many investigative stories into social issues have been the result of information first provided by grassroots activists. Without that, such suicides would have been noted in the local District Collector’s office, perhaps a rural journalist would have filed a report for the local supplement of a national newspaper, and the matter would have ended there, unnoticed by mainstream media. In fact, the ‘localization’ of the media, the advent of multiple editions of the larger Indian language newspapers with district editions, has been a significant factor in bringing news to the forefront that would otherwise have been ignored.

 

To conclude, the media’s treatment of the current agrarian crisis exemplifies the change of direction that it has taken. As a result, many legitimate subjects meriting media attention have been knocked off the shelf. One among them is the agrarian crisis. But it is not the only one.

These concerns come into focus when there is political mobilization, or when a media house makes a conscious decision to be different and to cover such stories. However, it is unrealistic to expect that mainstream media would conclude that as the agrarian crisis today touches the lives of the majority of Indians, it constitutes a legitimate story that should be covered. The reason, as mentioned previously, is the dominant belief that the job of the media is to cater to its clientele including those who undergird its existence, the advertisers. Anything that increases sales will be given greater prominence than the gravest of tragedies affecting the not-so-important citizens of our country.

 

* Kalpana Sharma is the author of Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories From Asia’s Largest Slum, Penguin Books India, 2008.