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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Farm, Fractured -V Kumara Swamy

Farm, Fractured -V Kumara Swamy

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published Published on May 20, 2018   modified Modified on May 20, 2018
-The Telegraph

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi prepares to mark his fourth anniversary in power, V. Kumara Swamy takes stock of how hollow his promises to farmers have been. Will there be a price to pay?

Hemant Patidar, a farmer, has been camping at the Mandsaur mandi in Madhya Pradesh with 15 quintals of “good quality” garlic for more than a week now. The price has been on a downslide for the last two months. The last one week it has gone down from Rs 400 a quintal to Rs 50. But even at this price he cannot find buyers. It was not meant to be like this.

Patidar is distraught. This mandi is part of the National Agriculture Market portal or e-NAM launched by the Narendra Modi government. It was meant to do away with middlemen and help farmers get the right price for their produce.

While Patidar is agonising about his garlic in MP, a few thousand miles away in Delhi, the Union agriculture ministry is busy preparing flashy booklets and nifty presentations to showcase what it will call achievements and how these would result in the realisation of one of the Prime Minister's many dreams - doubling farmers' incomes by 2022. In the 2018 budget speech, finance minister Arun Jaitley said: "Our emphasis is on generating higher incomes for farmers. We consider agriculture as an enterprise and want to help farmers produce more from the same land parcel at lesser cost and simultaneously realise higher prices for their produce."

In the last four years, the Modi government has not tired of reiterating its achievements - surgical strikes, GST implementation, demonetisation, 7 per cent GDP growth, strong FDI flows. Its claims in the agriculture sector are no less.

On the eve of the Bharatiya Janata Party government's fourth anniversary, here's a status update on how these claims tally against the efforts on the ground.

National Agriculture Market portal

Budget allocation - Rs 200 crore. Launched in 2016. Meant to integrate 585 regulated wholesale markets. To allow farmers to sell produce to the highest bidders.

The name of the portal, e-NAM, is in keeping with the central government's other crafty coinages - BHIM, which is the app for digital payment; UMANG, the app to avail multiple government services. While launching the scheme in 2016, the Prime Minister had said: "This is a turning point for the agriculture world... This initiative will usher in transparency which will greatly benefit the farmers... Farmers can decide when, where and at what price they can sell in the wholesale mandis online."

According to the latest figures, 585 mandis have been enrolled under e-NAM, and 200 more are likely to be connected soon. But only a fraction of the total commodities produced in India are traded online - most other regulated markets remain beyond the purview of e-NAM. And even in these 585, most of the procurement is done by government agencies with very little private participation.

The biggest problem with e-NAM is lack of transparency. How the prices are set and how they move remains a mystery. Says an agitated Hemant Patidar, "We were better off without it. The quality checks are arbitrary and middlemen are more active than ever before. The only losers are people like us."

With these mandis lacking in adequate infrastructure to check the quality of commodities, storage and transportation, the platform is yet to be fine-tuned into a working proposition. Says Vikas Jain, a trader of commodities at Mandsaur, "Somebody sitting in Madurai and willing to buy onions from Mandsaur wants the right price and good quality. The quality checks, one of the most important principles to instil confidence, are not in place. Farmers don't understand how the system works or how the prices are determined. The government is trying to sell a comb to a bald man."

Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana

Budget allocation - Rs 13,000 crore. Launched in April 2016. It fixed a low premium for farmers and increased the sum insured to cover cost of cultivation. Target - to bring 100 million hectares under it by 2018-19.

This was launched against the backdrop of a spate of farmer suicides countrywide. The concept underlying it is noble - farmers will contribute around 2 per cent of the crop insurance premium; the rest would be borne by the central and state governments.

It was to cover at least 50 per cent of the cropped area by 2018-19.

Ashok Gulati, an agriculture expert and a member of the erstwhile Planning Commission, points out that administrative glitches have tripped the scheme. "Several state governments have not honoured their premium payments for insurance companies even for 2016-17. What does one say of 2017-18," he asks.

Please click here to read more.

The Telegraph, 20 May, 2018, https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/farm-fracturednational-agriculture-market-portalpradhan-mantri-fasal-bim-231628?ref=india-new-stry


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