Recently, we have witnessed the strong farmers protests against the three farm laws brought by the government. Due to the regular pushback from farmers, government had to rollback all the three laws as there were no fruitful outcome. Government has been trying to solve the age old farmers suicide problem and at the same time trying to double the farmers income. But in my opinion any law brought out by government which does not directly put money in the hand of farmers or does not talk about fixing the MSP of food items as demanded by farmers, is going to meet the same fate and poor farmers continue to suffer.

In my opinion to solve this problem, government has to think differently and understand the root cause of this. At the same time, government also has to understand that all the schemes and laws created with the mindset of helping poor farmers does not always reach them and many times it only benefits the rich farmers who continue to enjoy the tax free income since past few decades.

An honest idea to stop farmers suicide and increase their income in India

Also Read: Why there are no tax respite for middle class families in India?

According to income tax law in India, any agricultural income generated from an agricultural land does not attract any income tax, even if the income is in crores. I am sure this law had been framed to benefit the poor farmers who many times suffers agriculture losses due to reasons such as deficient rainfall, flooding, lack of soil fertility, uncertain climatic conditions etc every year. But in reality this law has been used by many educated rich people to save themselves from paying any type of taxes to government.

This in turn puts pressure on government tax collection and hence government is not able to come up with any effective schemes or laws which can directly benefit poor farmers at large scale as it requires a huge amount of capital and may not be sustainable for long time given our current financial situation. This also means that entire tax burden is being put on salaried middle class who are already bearing the brunt of paying high taxes to government and does not get much in return.

So now the question is what is the real solution to all these problems then?  So here I would like to propose few solutions which not only benefits the poor farmers but also solves the government age old problem of stopping farmers suicide. Government is already running different types of schemes to support farmers but in addition to this, can we think about registering and then creating a database of all the farmers in our country with their total income declared so that government can identify the farmers who are really in need.

Not only this, can we now start talking about taxing a little to rich farmers based on data collected whose income are in multi crores every year and who can easily support other needy farmers by paying little tax to government instead of putting entire burden to middle class families. This will definitely help government filtering out the rich farmers from the poorest one so that schemes can be targeted to needy poor farmers and they can take all the benefit they really need.

This should also not cause any dispute or debate as we have already witnessed how both rich and poor farmers protested together against the farm law and showcased the brotherhood of thinking about each other. This clearly gives us the indication and a clear message that farmers making crores of profit every year is ready to support their poor farmer brothers. This is also the demand of the hour that rich people must start supporting their poor counterpart to reduce the tax burden on government. So that the money collected from tax can be used for other developmental purposes.

Aggregated data would also help government track all the declared and undeclared movable and immovable assets and cross check the same with the amount of wealth generated. This should also help catching all the different types of frauds people now a days doing by suddenly becoming a farmer to save their taxes. This will help government track all the income generated by the farmers and where that money is flowing through with tons of other information.

So long story short, this way I see lot of benefits for both farmers and government along with some relief for salaried middle class. I wonder what do you think about this? Kindly let me know your feedback in the comment box.