Updated: December 24, 2020 7:47:32 am
Patiala: Women relatives of farmers protesting in Delhi work in the fields in their absence, in Daun Kalan village in Patiala. (PTI)
Jasbir Kaur, 37, is a seven-acre farmer in the village of Chohan near the Jalandhar-Amritsar GT road. Grow wheat and rice, potatoes and peas. The first two are collected by public procurement agencies at the Minimum Subsistence Price (MSP) and the last two crops are sold to private traders.
While wheat and rice rates are at least “pucca” (predictable), he says, there is a large fluctuation in the prices of non-MSP crops. “Tukka chalda hai… jaise jua (it’s a bet, a roll of the dice)”. A month ago peas cost Rs 102 / kg on the market, today you sell them to the trader at Rs 13-14 / kg.
You get good prices if you stay in the lead, but there are more lows than highs, there is no guarantee to recoup even input costs, and price fluctuation is primarily a drop, rarely a peak. On the other hand, the rates of khaad, beej, spray (fertilizers, seeds, other inputs) only increase.
She would have gone to sit on the borders of Delhi, says Jasbir, but she will let the protesters gathered there speak for her, “they are sitting there in the cold for all of us, not just for themselves.”
She is held back by her circumstances. Her husband cannot speak or listen, and after the death of her father-in-law and brother-in-law, she is the provider for her family of six, which includes her mother-in-law and three children who go to school. .
“Farm laws are Modi’s mann ki baat, not ours,” says Jasbir. “The bigger private players will give us good prices for the first one or two years, and then … If Modi is worried about me, he should give more jobs here first.”
Jasbir fears for his eldest daughter Anureet, who just finished class 12, and his son Jashanpreet, 16; They both study in the most expensive private school because it is intermediate in English.
They’ll take IELTS, he says with an air of resignation: IELTS, which is prominently advertised on billboards in the Doaba-Majha region, which is also packed with IELTS centers, is a popular test of English language proficiency for international studies. and migration. Australia is increasingly a favorite Punjab destination.
“Many young people from this village have settled abroad in Canada and the United States. I don’t want my children to do kisani (agriculture), aithe kujh nahi rakheya, there is nothing for them. I also don’t want them to go so far from home. But do I have a choice? There is no sarkari naukri or any other work here … Young people in my village and the surrounding areas have become addicted to drugs … Dar lagda hai, malik bacha ke rakhe (may God keep my children safe) ” , He says.
Jasbir’s fear of being left alone to do unequal business with large and powerful corporations, larger than the merchants she already deals with and is often exploited by, her anxieties about jobs and the future of her children, her lack of alternatives, they are real. And they have rallied around the new laws that the government is seen to be pushing and that protesters on the Delhi borders are resisting.
Similar anxieties and fears, which must be addressed, if not countered or addressed, resonate as a refrain in conversations with various farmers across the state.
You hear them most in Malwa, the largest agricultural belt with 14 of Punjab’s 22 districts, home to most small and fringe farmers (1-5 acre holdings), rampant agricultural debt, and more than 90 percent of their farmer suicides. .
Here, concerns about the three farm laws, based on what they see and hear, and based on their own struggles and experiences, are voiced more insistently by smaller farmers.
Many cite what they call the “Jio-BSNL” example to illustrate their suspicion that “Ambani-Adani,” large corporations with deep pockets, will seize the opening. They will pay well for the first few years, their story goes, only to be held back later, leaving the farmers with nowhere else to go: the sarkari mandi would have withered from neglect.
The reference is to the disruption of the telecommunications market by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm by launching low-cost 4G services, lowering rates, their subsequent rate hikes and increasing dominance, even as the government-owned BSNL already it is in a downward spiral. , went into further decline.
Many cite their own experience with wheat-free, MSP-free rice crops that they already sell to private operators and traders, from whom they cannot recover input costs. Or that they are bought very cheap and the merchant sells them for a large profit.
Basmati, bought from the farmer last year at Rs 3,000 per quintal, but this year at Rs 1,700. Cauliflower bought from the farmer at Rs 5 / kg sold in the market at Rs 50 / kg. Potato bought last year at Re 1 / kg sold at Rs 50-60 / kg.
They point to UP and Bihar. Bihar repealed the APMC Act in 2006, but it visibly fell short of the stated goal of attracting private sector investment in marketing infrastructure and creating more efficient markets for better price discovery: rice in Bihar sells for less than half of the Punjab MSP.
In the village of Kotra Lehal, in the Sangrur district, from where a new cart loaded with men and provisions leaves for the protest site on the Delhi border, Gurtej Singh says: “We see that the rice huskers from here go to buy rice at lower prices in UP-Bihar and make money selling it here in Punjab: up to 2 lakh rupees per truck, even after taking transport costs into account. “
And Sandeep, whose husband has just returned from the Delhi border protests after a week, says: “Farmers who have their own land in UP-Bihar come to work as day laborers in the wheat and rice fields of small farmers like us in Punjab. . Now they are telling us, we came here, but where are you going to go?
Her husband Bahadur Singh articulates another anxiety: “If the factories come, as some promise, the machines will work, or the highly educated, not people like us.” Until recently, not many in this town studied beyond class 12.
Not only is the government failing to respond to these anxieties and fears about what it is and what could change for the worse, it is also seen as in a desperate rush to put them aside and adopt new laws.
First, reform the flaws in the existing procurement system, says Amarinder Singh, who has an agricultural processing center on his farm in Lakhowal village. “Fix your corruptions first, explore more export options. Then bring us alternatives. Show us a successful pilot experiment, where farmers have benefited from similar changes in the marketing system, ”he says.
Baljit Singh in Kotra Lehal notes the growing sense of dissonance and disconnection: “It’s like we have a fever and you insist on giving us medicine for stomach pain.”
For now, on the new laws, farmers, farm workers, and commission agents or arhtiyas are speaking largely with the same voice. The perceived threat it poses to the existing marketing regime is not just hiding its dissatisfaction with the old system, but also relegating differences and conflicting interests within and between these three groups.
The arhtiya makes timely loans in an emergency, without asking them, like the bank, to mortgage their land, farmers say; they overlook the exorbitant interest rates it also charges.
In this upheaval, the arhtiya has been accused of instigating the farmer, using him as a front. Their substantial commission, protected in the mandi of the government, may not be ensured in the new regime that promises to end “bicholia” or intermediaries.
In Khanna mandi, Punjab’s largest grain market, Harbans Singh Rosha, chairman of the Khanna association and vice chairman of the state arhtiya association, says the commission’s agents support farmers’ agitation, not push for it. “Our association set up a separate tent on the Singhu border, but we have not contributed money; in fact, when we offered money, the farmers turned it down. “
For the arhtiyas it is also a major fear. For them, it is not simply the end of a lucrative commission, but a larger decline: they are part of a mandi regime that supports small armies allied with pre-computer munims (accountants) and unskilled workers. It is about losing a way of life.
“You will no longer find anyone under 50 in our profession. Our children don’t want to do this job. Like the small farmer, the small arhtiya will also be finished when the big ones come in, ”says Rosha.
From Chohan’s young and vulnerable mother and farmer Jasbir Kaur to Rosha, a bored defender of an old-fashioned mandi style, new farm laws are uniting unlikely partners, forging new bonds of insecurity.
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