THE All India Agricultural Workers Union (AIAWU) with a membership of over seven million members in 16 states of the country is one of the premier organisations of the rural working masses. It is deeply concerned with the worsening condition of the economy of the country whose GDP has sunk to 4.5 per cent, in 2019-20 from 7.2 per cent in 2014-15, with industrial growth falling from 7.3 per cent in July 2018 to  2.1 per cent in July 2019. In the field of agriculture the rate of growth which remained at 3.7 per cent in 2014 fell to 2.75 per cent in 2018-19 and has fallen further to 2 per cent in June 2019, reflecting the deepening of the agrarian crisis as part of an all round downturn of the economy.
In the same period, unemployment has grown from 3.52 per cent in 2017 to 6.4 per cent, in 2019 and the figure appears to be growing consistently which is cause for concern. In fact we are facing the highest unemployment in 45 years. Given the fact that under NDA rule the richest 1 per cent of India’s population owns 74 per cent of wealth of the country today when it owned only 47 per cent in 2014 shows that the vast majority of the Indian people have neither the assets nor the possibility of work. This is a situation that is extremely serious and the government should tackle it urgently.
Rather than that it has chosen to let the economy collapse and has decided to divide the people on religious lines or to suddenly threaten them with diversionary measures like demonetisation, NCR and the CAA, which has caused widespread misery among the rural people.  AIAWU expresses its solidarity with those resisting this process and will discuss them in its forthcoming 9th all India conference in Kannur in Kerala on January 1-3, 2020 and chalk out broad programmes of action to unite the Indian people in the spirit that mobilised them  against the attacks being launched against them and the constitution we gave ourselves.
This requires an exposure of the anti-people policies of the present government that are not only destructive but divisive and dangerous also. It is time organisations of the masses came forward to expose the false claims of the government and demand measures that will bring unity and relief to the people like MNREGA, food security, implementation of the Forest Rights Act, house sites and land, free education and health facilities as well as the physical protection of women, dalits and minorities from a government committed to communalism, patriarchy and the Manu Smriti.
The All India Agricultural Workers Union is committed to discussing these issues democratically and in depth in the conference, taking up these pressing concerns of the rural masses and launching struggles all over the country independently and jointly to defend our constitutional right to life and security of the masses, their education on a secular and scientific basis with a powerful resistance against communalism, prejudice and authoritarianism, which is creating misery and terror among the people.