Patna: Amid continuing protests by Indian farmers over minimum support price (MSP) for produce, a farmer in Bihar ran his tractor over standing crop of cauliflower planted in 2.81 hectares of land as he was being forced to sell his produce for a Rs1 a kilogram — much below the cost price. He had invested Rs400,000 in the vegetable business.
Om Prakash Yadav, a farmer from Muktapur village in Samastipur district, destroyed his standing cauliflower crops on Tuesday while driving the tractor himself. In a video that has gone viral on social media, the angry farmer can be seen driving the tractor from one corner of the plantation to the other, until the vegetables were destroyed. The video footage also shows the local villagers scrambling to pick up vegetables from the field and then running away with bundles of cauliflowers in their arms.
“It’s over now. From now on, I will never plant vegetables in my field. I had taken a loan of Rs400,000 (Dhs20,000) from the bank for vegetable plantation hoping to earn double the amount, but I have lost the entire amount,” a distressed Yadav told the media on Wednesday.
He alleged that no one was taking note of farmers’ problems. “Well, you can imagine why farmers are ending their lives in India. I hoped to pay up the education fees of my children and also earn good profits from this business but what I got in the end was a huge loss,” he said.
He alleged the farmers were being compelled to sell their produce at throwaway prices to the local businessmen who sell the same at higher rates. Currently, cauliflower is being sold at Rs10 a kg in Patna while in metros, its prices are even higher. But in the countryside, the situation is just the reverse.
It’s not only vegetables, the case is the same with paddy cultivators in Bihar who are being forced to sell their produce at much lower price than the government-fixed MSP of 1,868 a quintal. “We are being forced to sell our paddy at the rate of barely Rs400-500 a quintal. We have no option other than selling them at throwaway price,” said farmers from Mokama block in Patna district.
A farmer from Jamui, Naresh Murmu, said he had invested Rs12,000 in paddy farming this season hoping to make good profits but suffered loss instead. “I was forced to sell 10 quintals of my paddy at the rate of only Rs1,050 a quintal,” said the farmer.
Experts said farmers are forced to sell their paddy roughly at Rs900-Rs1,000 a quintal against the MSP of Rs1,868 as fixed by the Indian government. “What is more distressing, at least 50 percent farmers are not even getting the cost of investment in farming,” said professor DM Diwakar, a prominent economist and former director at AN Sinha Institute of Social studies at Patna.
