Not By Fine Tuning

IN a rather bizarre manifestation of the proclaimed 'non-political' character of the farmers' agitations going on in different parts of the country, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, who is of course a member of the ruling party, has called for the removal of the Governor of the Reserve Bunk for allegedly making anti-farmer remarks in his Coromandel Lecture in New Delhi earlier this month. I G Patel devoted considerable attention in his lecture to the question of price support for agriculture and more generally to the relative importance to be assigned to agriculture in investment programmes. While he maintained that it was right for the government to have adopted the policy of agricultural price support at the time when it was first introduced, he feared that in today's conditions "support prices could serve sectional rather than national interests". High support prices, apart from becoming an engine of inflation, could cause mis-direction of resources by encouraging investment in, and output of, agricultural products on a scale not justified by the demand for them