“The loan waiver is welcome but that it is not the solution to the problem. It is just a small step to resolve the crisis,” said Sainath while delivering the third Sumitra Chisti Memorial Lecture at Constitution Club today.

Sainath said the “heart of the problem lies in the fact that the cost of cultivation for the Indian farmer has risen between Rs 300-500 per cent since 1991 but there has been no increase in the income of the farmer”.

“On the contrary, there has been a steady decline in the income while cost of cultivation per acre has gone up from Rs 2,500 in 1991 to Rs 13,500 now,” says the Mumbai-based journalist and author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought in 2003.

“Our policies are driven towards corporate farming which is making farming unviable for the small time farmer and this is a problem faced not just by India, but countries like the US as well,” he said.

Sainath said the agrarian crisis needs to be looked at wholistically. “The crisis is not just because of loan debts. We need to look at why farmers are taking loans. We cannot disconnect what’s happening in the agriculture sector from what is happening in other sectors. Everything is inter-related,” he said.

The memorial lecture is organised every year in March by Delhi-based Social Advancement and Development Trust in memory of noted economist and Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Sumitra Chisti.