No more farm fires

Govt must not let agri protests escalate

The protest rally by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), an umbrella body of farmers’ unions, in Delhi on Monday might not have been as big as anticipated but it has managed to bring the issue of farmers’ unrest back in focus. The most worrisome is the warning issued by the SKM leaders that if the commitments made to them in December 2021 are not met, they would hold a protest bigger than the almost one-year-long blockade of the Delhi borders that forced the Central government to repeal the controversial farm laws.

Moreover, the list of their demands, some of which seem untenable, has swelled to include, apart from the legal guarantee on minimum support price (MSP), loan waiver, free power supply, pension for the aged, withdrawing cases against farmers, and compensation to the families of those who died during the previous agitations. They also want the government committee on crop prices dissolved because its terms of reference do not include the core issue of legislation on MSP. The SKM had boycotted this panel. The sole redeeming development, if any, was the opportunity the farmers’ representatives got to meet Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar, though they did not seem fully satisfied with its outcome.

The SKM’s next course of action is proposed to be decided on April 30 after reviewing what steps the government takes to address the unresolved issues. The ball, therefore, is now in the government’s court to save the situation from taking an untoward turn. The task, evidently, is not easy, especially considering that some of the demands, even if prima facie justifiable, are impractical from the implementation point of view. Making MSP legally binding and complete debt remission are the key ones among them. Even now, though MSP is recommended by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices and fixed by the government for more than 20 crops, these are applicable effectively only for a handful of commodities, such as wheat, paddy, sugarcane, and cotton, and in limited areas where the infrastructure for public procurement exists. Elsewhere, these prices remain largely on paper, serving merely as notional benchmarks for the market.

However, the government can — and, in fact, should — take measures to prevent price slumps of the kind witnessed in the case of onions and potatoes this year. A scheme for this purpose, named aptly the Pradhan Mantri Annadata Aay Sanrakshan Abhiyan (PM-AASHA) and launched with great enthusiasm in September 2018, exists in government files, though it has seldom been put into practice. It is meant primarily to ensure remunerative returns to farmers either through direct market intervention or by recompensing the difference in the model prices and the prices received by them. This scheme, envisaged to be implemented in collaboration with state governments, can be resurrected, or some other similar instrument can be conceived, to provide the necessary price support to farmers. Some of the other demands, such as withdrawing court cases against the agitating farmers or cash assistance to the families of the deceased are, in any case, not too difficult to fulfil. The government must make sure that farmers’ agitation doesn’t escalate as it did over a year ago.