The Modi government’s decision to negotiate with the Punjab farmers who have been agitating under the leadership of Jagjit Singh Dallewal marks a change from the earlier stance of leaving it to Supreme Court to issue directions. Whether the negotiations will lead to a breakthrough between the two sides remains to be seen.
It must be recalled that, in September 2020, three farm laws were enacted in Parliament, leading to year-long protests by farmers of various states demanding their withdrawal. On Guru Nanak Jayanti (19 November 2021), Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his address to the nation, announced repeal of the three laws. He also announced that a committee will be set up to deliberate on issues relating to minimum support price (MSP).
The committee’s mandate was to make suggestions to make MSP more effective and transparent. It was also expected to recommend a strategy for crop diversification to take farmers out of wheat and rice cycles. Mapping of cropping patterns of producers and strengthening of agricultural marketing system were other items on its brief.
However, it took the government eight months to set up the promised committee under the chairmanship of Sanjay Agarwal, former agriculture secretary, who was in office while the farmers’ agitation took place from November 2020 to January 2021. The committee has 29 members. It was to include three members of Sanyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) but SKM has not nominated anyone. By the end of July 2024, the committee had held six meetings. However, despite having substantial inputs, the committee has not submitted even an interim report in the last two-and-a-half years.
Siraj Hussain, an agriculture expert and former bureaucrat, believes that the present agitation of farmers, mostly from Punjab, revolves around the realisation that cultivation of paddy in its present form cannot go on forever. Punjab farmers have to irrigate paddy fields 20-25 times, while other crops may require only 4-5 irrigations. They end up spending more money year after year in boring even deeper tube wells. This is because ground water levels are going down. According to the Central Ground Water Board, 65.34 per cent of the wells registered a fall in the level of underground water between 2013 and 2022. Punjab extracts 28 billion cubic metres (b cm) of groundwater every year but its annual recharge is only 19 b cm.
Does a solution lie in moving away from paddy and crop diversification? It is not that Punjab farmers have no experience of diversification. Potato is a major vegetable crop cultivated on more than 117,000 hectares. In 2023-24, it produced 3.24 million tonnes of crop, most of which was for seed production. Similarly, a substantial number of farmers have experience of growing vegetables too.
Price fluctuation
But the paddy farmers of Punjab have been watching the fluctuation in prices of potato seeds and vegetables. They have also been noting the downward spiral in prices of soybean in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, where they have been forced to sell soybean at about Rs4,100-4,200 per quintal, while the MSP is Rs4,892 per quintal. In addition, the announcement of bonus of Rs900 per quintal on paddy in MP, Chhattisgarh and Odisha would not have been lost on them as, in Punjab and Haryana, they get only the MSP for their paddy.
Since they are used to selling their entire produce of non-basmati paddy to government agencies at MSP, they want a similar dispensation for other crops too. Several times in the last decade, the paddy crop was damaged due to various reasons, but almost the entire mandi arrivals were still procured by the government, as the specifications of paddy were relaxed by the Union government under lot of pressure from the state government.
For several years, maize has been offered as an alternative to paddy in kharif. Due to an attractive price of ethanol manufactured from maize, Punjab farmers saw an opportunity to diversify from paddy. However, in the absence of an assurance that they will get MSP for entire maize production, the farmers are not assured of stable and remunerative income from maize.
Hussain feels that, while the demand for a legal right to realise MSP for all the crops for which it is declared by the Union government may be hard to accept, due to the financial implications, it may be a good idea to explore other means to reduce fluctuation in prices of major crops, including even those crops in which India is a net importer. This will help not only the farmers of the MSP crops but also the farmers of fruits and vegetables, which are more prone to price fluctuations, vagaries of weather and are grown mostly by small and marginal farmers.