Should FREE POWER be given to farmers?

Farmers is that section of our country which aid the economy to a very large extent, as agricultural sector contributes heavily around 17.2% to GDP growth, to support the farmers government give subsidies on various commodities like food items, water supply, fertilizes and pesticides and many other facilities are provided at subsidized  prices to the farmers, but government is not able to keep an eye on the utilization of these resources whether they have been utilized efficiently or not. Due to lack of awareness many farmers remain ignorant from the benefits of the technology applied in agriculture, and if some of them are aware of it they do not use it in an efficient way, rather they are not able to use it because many machines and equipment are not easy to understand or they demand the expensive inputs as energy to operate them, many such equipments are electricity driven or fuels driven like kerosene or diesel, Now a big question arises whether government should provide subsidy on these items to farmers or not, for which government itself is dependent upon the imports from the other countries.

So on the basis of aforementioned scenario of our agricultural sector and the farmers there is a big question which may arise in our minds. "Should free power be given to the farmers or not". We may think that as high growth in agriculture depends upon the modern products and equipments for farming which now a days farmers tend to use those, although with a little knowledge about them, these equipments are mainly electricity driven, so it is very important to subsidize the electricity for farmers. But a non renewable resource of energy like electricity for which government is dependent upon the diminishing quantity of coal in the country which in turn leads to dependency on imports from other countries. Can government afford to give subsidy on such an expensive energy? which is not even utilized in an efficient way generally.

Imagine! If free power is given to farmers they may over exploit the technical equipments for farming which may waste a huge amount of electricity, this situation may lead to excessive wastage of water for irrigation through tube-wells which will drop the water table which may be proved as a very dangerous situation for an agriculture based country. Cases of illegal theft of electricity will shoot by manifold because there is not enough importance given to keeping a check on the proper utilization of the provided resources, which is nothing but a huge loss of one of the most expensive resources of the nation. Because agricultural income is tax free in India, many rich guys have deliberately invested in land to pass off as agriculturists. They actually do not require any subsidies but get them anyway. Even if power subsidy has to be given, we should distinguish between rich and poor farmers. The free power generally is of "poor" quality - (voltage and frequency) because cash starved electricity boards ensure that they given better quality power to paying customersSubsidies, if not uniformly given throughout the country, have a bad effect and could lead to regional destabilization. "Power" is a subject of the state government and free power is being used as a political tool to get votes. 

It is a well known fact that we do not care about those things which come for free to us. So to prevent the deterioration of the significance of the electricity and to make them understand the value of electricity so they will try to utilize it in a best possible manner without under any scrutiny by the government body at least electricity should not be subsidized for the farmers. This will instill a sense of significance of energy saving in everyone who understands the plight condition of the farmers.