Opinion: Farmers do not eat announcements

A secretary is not a ceremonial chair. In a department that must move water, credit, seed, fertiliser and compensation across a state before the rains arrive, the secretary is the person who signs, coordinates and answers. Tamil Nadu's Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Department has now gone a month without a full-time head, its secretary transferred to Archaeology, no successor named. The Opposition Leader has demanded an immediate appointment. He is right to demand it, and the demand should embarrass the government into moving today, not at its leisure.

Consider what farmers are being asked to carry in the meantime. Irrigation water that does not reach the tail-end fields of Muthupettai, so cultivators block a road. Water held in Veeranam Lake while crops wait, so farmers step into the lake itself to be heard. A crop loan waiver promised in a manifesto and still argued over, so a farmers' union announces a siege of the Secretariat on October 14. Each of these is a file that needs a name at the top of it. Each is currently moving, if it moves at all, through a department whose permanent head is absent and whose minister, the Opposition says, is inactive.

The Dravidian tradition this paper honours was built on a simple insistence: that the tiller of the soil is not a beneficiary waiting for grace but a citizen owed a functioning state. Periyar's rationalism was never abstract philosophy; it was a demand that institutions serve people instead of decorating power. Anna turned that insistence into administration. Kalaignar, whatever his critics said, understood that a welfare promise is only as good as the officer ordered to deliver it before the season turns. A separate Agriculture Budget, proudly presented, means nothing if the chair that must execute it stays empty for a month.

That is why this vacancy is not a bureaucratic footnote. Samba cultivation does not wait for a government's convenience. Natural calamities do not check whether a department has a secretary before they arrive. When planning is poor and leadership is missing, the cost is not paid in the Secretariat; it is paid at the tail-end of a canal, in interest on a loan that was supposed to be waived, in a crop that misses its water by a week.

The government should do three things, in order. Appoint an experienced senior officer as full-time Agriculture Secretary today, and say publicly who is accountable for water release, loan relief and samba support in each district. Publish a dated plan for the October 14 demands instead of waiting to be besieged. And answer, in the Assembly and outside it, the plain question the Opposition has put: if agriculture deserved its own budget, why did it not deserve its own secretary?

Farmers do not eat announcements. They eat what grows when water, credit and decisions arrive on time. A government that leaves the department leaderless for a month has made a decision too, and farmers are entitled to judge it by that decision until a better one is signed.