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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The Ghost of Demonetisation Still Haunts Marathwada's Farmers -Parth MN

The Ghost of Demonetisation Still Haunts Marathwada's Farmers -Parth MN

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published Published on Sep 24, 2017   modified Modified on Sep 24, 2017
-TheWire.in

The cashless future that demonetisation promised never came, and many in rural Marathwada scoff at the idea.

Aurangabad:
Ten months after currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 were scrapped on November 8 last year, the ghost of demonetisation continues to haunt Deepak Badavne.

In early November, Badavne had harvested 31 quintals of cotton from his 2.5 acre farm. He expected good returns on it. “The trader arranged for the truck and loaded the cotton from my house,” he says. But just then, the demonetisation-induced cash crunch hit the farm sector. The payment for Deepak’s cotton didn’t materialise. ‘The trader is now saying he will pay by Diwali [by mid-October 2017],” he says.

The trader owes Badavne Rs 178,483 for his cotton yield. A cheque he received for this amount on March 24 bounced – thrice.  “I am not the only one,” says Deepak, 31, sitting under a tree in Karajgaon village on the outskirts of Aurangabad city in Marathwada, Maharashtra. “There are others in my village who have been similarly duped.”

Badavne, who lives in a joint family and has two children, has gathered some of them in this village of 1,300 people – people who are also waiting for their dues or have received cheques that bounced. In April, nearly six months after the demonetisation, Deepak’s brother Jeetendra, 38, got a nearly two lakh rupees for 34 quintals of cotton. That too bounced. “What am I supposed to do with this if I cannot have cash in hand?” he asks. “I need cash to buy inputs for the cropping season [that started in mid-June].”

On the morning of our visit in June, the trader in question had left the village to avoid reporters. So he was unavailable to give his version of the events, and is therefore not named in this story.

When the angry group barged into his house, his mother threatened that they would be responsible if her son committed suicide. “The trader said the cash crunch was responsible for the delays in payment,” says Deepak, “but the sowing season does not wait for us. We have filed an FIR [at the Karmad police station, around four kilometres away, on charges of cheating].”

In Hasanabadwadi village on the Aurangabad-Jalna highway, Atul Antarai, 28, was also struggling in June, months after the demonetisation. He has 1,000 mosambi trees on five acres. “I have a private well and borewell,” he says, “so I manage to water the orchard better than many farmers cultivating mosambi around me.”

In the first week of November, a trader had approached Antarai and offered him Rs. 6.5 lakhs for the entire produce. “I had planned on harvesting around February,” he says. “And going by the rate of Rs 30-35 per kilo, I expected to make Rs. 10 lakhs from the crop. I told the trader I would get back to him.”

On November 8, however, after the government’s ‘notebandi’ order, the same trader did not have the cash anymore, and rates plummeted. “I eventually got Rs 1.25 lakh for the entire yield,” says Atul. “Where I had expected Rs 30-35 a kilo, I ended up selling the fruit at Rs 3 a kilo.”

Please click here to read more.
 

TheWire.in, 23 September, 2017, https://thewire.in/180312/demonetisation-marathwada-farmer-incomes/


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