The stench is overpowering. As you drive down the Grand Trunk Road through Uttar Pradesh’s Kannauj district, the heart of the state’s potato cultivation, truckloads of rotting potatoes have been dumped along the highway. In a poll season, the plight of the potato farmers is a virtual ‘hot potato’ among political parties in this region. Rahul Gandhi has used the issue to whip up support among farmers here for the Congress and its policy on foreign direct investment in retail.
Farmers in the potato belt of Kannauj and Farrukhabad say they have been driven to destitution and are on the verge of committing suicide. Rajesh Kashyap, a potato farmer who has been forced to make his wife and children work as farm hands along with him, says, “For the past two years we have been throwing away our potato crop; even the cattle don’t eat it.”
Kashyap adds, “Potato prices had fallen so low last October that despite having to throw out the produce from the cold storage, we still had to pay Rs 40 as rent to the cold storage. We were completely ruined.”
His wife, Radha Kashyap, minces no words in expressing her anger for political parties. “Be is SP, BSP or Congress, none of them have done anything to improve the situation. Potatoes from UP have to be exported to other countries,” says Radha.
In such a crisis situation, marriages have been put on hold. And some cultivators have even committed suicide, she added.
This year, however, farmers are hopeful as prices have rationalised and are fetching anywhere between Rs 140 to Rs 150 a quintal. Last October/November, prices had fallen to as low as Rs 70 a quintal.
Dotting the highway alongside the fields are a line of cold storages. These cold storages are vital for the sustenance of the potato economy, says Amit Dikshit, president of the Kannauj Cold Storage Owners Association. “For two years in a row (2010 and 2011), we had a bumper crop and the cold storages were overflowing with the produce but there was no commensurate demand for the crop.”
Dikshit says in most cases, cold storage owners themselves offloaded the potatoes from their units onto the field when the cold storage rental (Rs 135 from February to November) outstripped the market price (Rs 70), and farmers did not take back their produce. Last year, from the 98 cold storage units in Kannauj district alone, 10,000 quintals from each had gone waste.
Dikshit maintains that it is not just the farmers who are in crisis. Cold storage units too faced losses. “After all, we are service providers”, says Diskhit.
The problem lies in the fact that UP is facing intense competition from other states like West Bengal, which has started flooding the markets in Bihar, with the result that the demand from UP is dipping drastically.
Adds Dikshit, “In such a scenario, neither the government nor any of the political parties have set up any plant or industry for potato products like potato chips, which could alleviate such a situation.” Significantly, the Congress election manifesto has promised that potato processing plants would be set up in this region. But the stakeholders in this potato economy are far from convinced.
Diskhit believes FDI in retail cannot be the panacea as consumption of the produce has to be boosted, not storage.
Kannauj,which has Akhilesh Yadav as MP is a reserved constituency with a sitting Samajwadi Party MLA. While the Dalit vote is likely to be split between the BSP and SP; Vishwanath S Girhar, a resident of Mayawati’s ‘Malin basti’ and a longtime Congress worker, says the party’s faulty ticket distribution has angered party workers. SP rebels like Chotte Singh Yadav in Chibbramau and Digambar Yadav have been given preference over Congress nominees.
The historically important Kannauj, which was present Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit’s Lok Sabha constituency in the ’80s, can now only be rescued through policy interventions that will bring in industry to this essentially agrarian economy.
