Karnataka's cart-and-bullock story ends

First, the cart did not move. Next, the bullock was not to be found. Now, there is neither a cart nor a bullock. That is the cart-and-bullock story from Karnataka!

Two years after the then JD(S)-BJP government announced the cart-and-bullock scheme for the farming community, the State Executive Committee headed by Governor Rameshwar Thakur gave a silent burial to the scheme last week after stopping short of branding it a 'complete failure'.

The scheme, titled 'Bhagyada Bandi-Yatthu Yojane', was conceived by the then chief minister H D Kumaraswamy and his deputy B S Yeddyurappa in the 2006-07 budget to please the farming community which had catapulted both leaders to power.

It envisaged a 50 per cent subsidy to small and marginal farmers, limited to Rs 10,000 for a pair of bullocks or a bullock cart. An allocation of Rs 20 crore (Rs 200 million) was made to benefit 20,000 farmers.

A senior agriculture department official, who did not want to be identified, told Business Standard: "The very idea of distributing bullock carts was faulty as it was mooted at a time when governments across the country were encouraging the use of tractors and power tillers under and farmers are beginning to respond to mechanisation.

Besides, giving a subsidy only for bullocks or only for carts defied logic as a marginal farmers would like to have both at any given point of time."

Despite these drawbacks, the government chose to go ahead with the scheme. It identified 10,848 beneficiaries for bullocks and 7,801 for carts. But what followed were mudslinging and corruption.

The government first set up local level committees headed by jurisdictional MLAs to identify beneficiaries and allegations about favouritism promptly surfaced.

Later, the poor quality of carts snowballed into a controversy. As Rs 10,000 was too low for building a quality cart and farmers were not willing to shell out from their pockets, carpenters supplied carts made out of sub-standard wood to the zilla panchayats, which were the nodal agencies for distributing carts to the identified beneficiaries.

In the open market, a high quality wooden-wheel cart was priced anywhere between Rs 16,000 - 18,000 and a rubber-tyres fitted cart Rs 25,000-28,000.

"As expected, the carts sourced by the government were of low quality. In some parts of North Karnataka districts, there were complaints about cart-wheels developing cracks within six months of hitting the road," the official said.

The government, which took note of the shortcomings, altered the scheme by stopping cart-distribution in mid-2007, but decided to go ahead with the distribution of bullocks. It planned to distribute 50,000 bullocks per year to farmers and earmarked Rs 50 crore (Rs 500 million) for the scheme.

However, bullocks had only expanded the scope for falsification of documents and corruption as farmers at several places obtained the subsidy by showing bullocks they already owned.

The governor's advisor Krishnakumar explained: "There were not enough bullocks in the state for the scheme to be carried forward. So we have decided to discontinue it. The funds will be used for mechanisation of agriculture."