Shri Y. B. Chavan : I do not know. I hope the Finance Minister is right and wish that he is not going to that length. Under the present pressure of inflation you will have only two alternatives; you increase the deficit financing, or you deprive your priority sectors, from further investment. In a developing country deficit financing has to be taken recourse to. But how much one could take recourse to that? If you go in for thousands you will ruin the country. What Charan Singh did and what you did this year has brought us to this position. The maximum deficit financing that a country like India can bear, according to my opinion, is Rs. 500 crores; that is the maximum, not more.
Shri Rajesh Pilot (Bharatpur) : You are late in that discovery.
Shri Y. B. Chavan : Better late than never. I must say that is my view. This is the position today. Agriculture, for example, it is the most important area of production. Nearly 70 per cent people of our country are engaged in agriculture. And only in that sector there is complete lack of incentive for production. What help India got in the last decade and a half is from the agriculture sector. As Indiraji in one of her interviews said that there were miracles to save India. I should say agriculture is one of the miracles. In the last decade and a half, Punjab, Andhra, Haryana and other areas have come to the help of India and they have produced more sugar and some other areas produced something more. What are we doing for the agriculture sector today? You are doing something here and there. You are doing something for irrigation I know.
But the agriculturists as an individual, has to consider his economy. Does it profit him to continue to do production in the farming. Does it really speaking help him to continue farming? It is the question that any Government must ask itself. Unfortunately, the answer is ‘No’. Whatever area you take, whether in agriculture - I do not know his name, one hon. Member said, we are Kulaks because we are supporting farmers. If supporting farmers is being Kulaks, we don’t mind being Kulaks. We must support farmers. Farmers are the main supporters of India’s economy. If the farmers had not done what they had done in the last decade and a half, we would have been nowhere. The movement that has started is really a stupendous movement. Take a warning from it. They wanted more price for sugarcane, in fact, all sorts of farm productions, onions, sugarcane, rice; wheat and whatever other production the farmers undertakes. Now, he has to use other inputs, industrial inputs for the production with a view to increase the farm production. There, you must go to his help and see that either you reduce the price of the inputs, or give them more prices, if necessary; you can increase the prices for the producers and increase the prices for the consumers also possibly. You will have to think of some idea of subsidy, and give subsidy to the producers and also give subsidy to the consumer; that does not matter. (Interruptions).
