Rajesh Ramachandran
A Ludhiana gold merchant was recently booked for storing rice. It seemed that the farmers finally realized that the entrepreneurs were dropping their gold and harvesting rice. Unfortunately that was not the case. The business idea, after the Center passed the farm laws, was quite simple: buy cheap rice from distressed farmers in UP or Bihar, blatantly take it by road to Punjab, and sell it to the government in MSP. After all, the Union government had removed all the restrictions of the Agricultural Products Marketing Committee (APMC) and opened state borders for transportation, sale, and promotion. But there was a catch: the new central laws were being used to fool farmers in UP, Bihar, and elsewhere. It was the farmer-bound MSP that the Ludhiana gold merchant pocketed without having borrowed, plowed, sown, tended, and harvested or anxiously gazed at the skies with bated breath, desperately praying to the gods of time.
If the APMC structure is not necessary and the alternative market can offer remunerative prices, why would UP or Bihar farmers sell their paddy for Rs 800-1,000 per quintal?
The gold merchant is not alone. Approximately 95 FIRs were accommodated and more than 150 trucks bringing rice from other places confiscated by the Punjab government. After searching the smugglers, who donned the merchants cloak, officials realized that the culprits cannot be punished under existing APMC laws, for which they have been charged under the provisions of the IPC. However, the Punjab government has not completely disposed of the scandal. This year there was an excellent acquisition of rice in Punjab, the highest ever recorded: 203 lakh tonnes, 25 percent or 40 lakh higher than last year’s 163 lakh tonnes. The Punjab Agricultural University claimed that at least 10 percent of this is due to higher yields caused by favorable weather conditions. To the monsoon factor, officials add the decline in basmati acreage and lower purchases of rice from Punjab in the border districts of Haryana.
Still, the numbers don’t add up, so officials, informally at least, admit that around 10 lakhs of tons of rice may have been smuggled into Punjab. Later, Haryana officials insist that they have not driven away a single Punjab farmer who had a checking account with his mandis and arhtiyas. However, Haryana’s acquisitions are 14 percent less than the previous year’s figure because they claim they banned ‘ghost sellers’. Weather conditions and therefore performance cannot be that different in Punjab and Haryana. Therefore, the speculation is that traders buy rice from Bihar and UP at roughly Rs 1,200, including transportation costs, and sell it to the government to the MSP for Rs 1,888 per quintal, pocketing a good Rs 700 crore if the scam is to be found. limited to the conservative estimate of 10 lakh tonnes.
This is the immediate impact of the central laws that emboldened unscrupulous traders. They may have been doing it before, too, on a smaller scale. But now, it is officially allowed to take agricultural products anywhere in the country and sell them anywhere. But the problem is that there are no buyers except the government. So the first season after the passage of farm laws has shown that the concept of “one nation, one market” is false in the absence of regular buyers. The APMC structure was dismantled in Bihar in 2006 and the failure has been written about the state’s agricultural sector exporting agricultural workers to places where there are systematic government procurement.
If the APMC structure is not required, and the alternative market can offer remunerative prices for farmers, why would farmers in UP or Bihar sell their rice field for Rs 800-1,000 per quintal? If the trader can discover a market outside of APMC, why should he load the rice from Bihar or UP to Punjab to sell in APMC mandi? The answer is simple. The government is the only reliable buyer. The Green Revolution and Punjabi’s proud landowning farmer are corollaries of public procurement at a predetermined price known to the farmer and trader, which is supported by the mandi infrastructure. Any government that eliminates all of this in one fell swoop does so at the risk of ruining the farming community and the nation’s food security.
Politically empowered and informed landlords in Punjabi understand this better than their counterparts elsewhere. Just as Gujarat milk producers value Amul, Punjabi-Haryanvi grain producers value their APMC mandis. They legitimately fear that this is an attempt by the Center to privatize the process of purchasing food grains worth billions of rupees. Following the story of the privatization of India, our crony capitalists have always taken advantage of government facilitation, choosing public resources and profitable companies, and thereby privatizing profits while nationalizing their losses. Congress, of course, is the main engine, but governments of the left have also practiced this policy with great vigor.
Unfortunately, when all parties push for similar economic policies, the difference with the current BJP regime is that it does not have senior farmer leaders in the Union Cabinet. The caste composition of the party and government leadership is skewed against rural communities, with a strong bias towards urban groups. The BJP has been bypassing its own farmer leaders, such as Virender Singh of Ballia, who speak the language and understand the apprehensions of a landed villager.
The agricultural ordinances and subsequent laws betrayed a sense of urgency, which can only be explained in terms of a suspicious intention: the Ganges may be sacred but not clean by any means. It is an Indian tragedy that we continue to spoil even our dearest legacies. The BJP leadership would benefit immensely from listening to the venerable Laxmi Kanta Chawla, one of Punjab’s most respected politicians. His appeal to the national security hawks atop Raisina Hill that Punjabi farmers are Punjabi soldiers should make people who dress in battle uniforms for Diwali come to their senses.
