Nemai Ghosh, a 65-year old farmer in Belpukur village in the Nadia district of West Bengal says he has stopped growing pulses and will stick to paddy and jute. Nadia is a "pulse district" under the Food Security Mission, but Ghosh has only heard of it.
The mission, which is supposed to provide subsidies and sprinklers to encourage farmers to take up pulses production, has not reached farmers like him. Ghosh however couldn’t care less. For, pulse prices may be going up in the consuming centres, but the poor yield is just not cost-effective enough for him to grow the crop.
That’s the same reason Jaiprakash Sharma at Etroli village in Aligarh sticks to one bigha of land for arhar and the balance 22 bighas for wheat, paddy and fodder crops. He has been doing this year after year, no matter what the prices are in the market. Sharma says one bigha of land gets you a quintal (100 kg) of pulses or four quintals of paddy or wheat. Besides, pulses take too long to grow — nearly nine months — while other crops allow intercropping.
Ghosh and Sharma's arguments as well as those of others all over the country are the reasons pulse production in India has been stagnant at 14.8 million tonnes for the last three years even though prices in the markets have been going up.
“Market economics just don’t work here, there is no incentive for farmers to take to pulse farming,” said an observer.
The government has shown its intention to provide these incentives, with the Prime Minister announcing a new mission on pulses, the second after the one announced under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But many feel it wasn’t necessary because the recommendations of the National Farmers Commission set up a year ago have not been implemented. One of the recommendations was to provide farmers a minimum support price (MSP) that was half the market price.
The MSP of Rs 23 is just too little at a time when pulses sell at Rs 90 a kg in the retail market.
The farmer opts to sell it for around Rs 60 in the mandi. Some like Prahlad Sahu, a farmer in the Tareswar village in Chattisgarh, prefers to go to the middleman. He sold his arhar for Rs 47 a kg to middlemen who frequent his village. The mandi would have given him Rs 57, but Sahu would have had to bear the transportation cost.
Pulse farmers say the current MSP is meaningless. For example, the MSP for arhar is just Rs 2,000 a quintal, but farmers can sell it at Rs 6,000 a quintal at the mandi, courtesy the shortage. So it’s in the farmers’ interest that the shortage continues since there is no promise of a good price if they were to produce more.
Activists like Vijay Jaywantia blame the low MSP for the poor pulse production. “The MSP is like a threat to farmers against large-scale production”, he said. “If they were to produce more, they would be condemned to sell it at a low rate,” he added.
Food analyst Bhaskar Goswami said it’s as if the government is expecting farmers to subsidise consumers.
Mahendra Dev, chairman of the Committee on Agricultural Costs and Prices, said the MSP acts as the floor price. “If we increase it too much, it would lead to high rates in the market,” he says.
“That means let the farmers earn less,” is Jaywantia's response.
Dev admitted the government has to pay Myanmar and Canada almost the retail rates to import pulses, but said a market-linked MSP can cut both ways. If market prices go down, farmers would suffer too. His prescription: some other strategy has to be devised to push pulses production.
He said the Planning Commission had found that known technologies are enough to give a fillip to pulses production. “If we take known technologies to farmers and also push new research, there will be an impact, Dev added.
(With inputs from Margaret Williams in Nadia and R Krishnadas in Raipur)
