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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

In UP's sugar bowl, harvest is rich but not sweet -V Kumara Swamy

-The Telegraph

With an overload of cane price arrears, V Kumara Swamy warns of a looming crisis for farmers

Until a few years ago, you could tell the seasons in western Uttar Pradesh when you drove down its highways just by looking at the standing crops. In winter, one would see an unending landscape of swaying wheat and mustard, during summer it would be all sugarcane and paddy.

These days, almost through the seasons, all that one gets to see are swathes of green sugarcane in various stages of growth. The rains have been plentiful this year and there are indications enough that this will be a record-breaking year for sugarcane. The Centre has also raised the procurement price of the crop to Rs 275 per quintal — a hike of Rs 20 from 2017.

And yet the air is far from cheery at the community hall of the Aggarwal Mandi Tatiri village, five kilometres from the district town of Baghpat and 50 kilometres northeast of Delhi. “Our fields have never looked so beautiful, but we are filled with fear. We don’t know how much sugarcane will be bought by the local co-operative mill here and when we will get paid,” says Sanjay Kumar, a burly 40-year-old farmer with a handlebar moustache.

This time the headache for farmers has set in a bit early as the UP government has asked the mills to advance their crushing — in western UP it will start on October 15.

Kumar claims the Baghpat mill owes him Rs 1.5 lakh from the last season. There are about 20 farmers in the hall. A discussion starts on how much the mill owes each of them and the final figure comes to around Rs 45 lakh. Bhanwar Singh, a sugarcane cropper with a receding hairline, is smoking a hookah. He goes so far as to claim that the local mill owes more than Rs 2 crore to this panchayat alone. (Baghpat has scores of panchayats with similar dues.)

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