Bhopal: FM promises moon, farmers refuse to buy it

Bhopal: It seems that the finance minister Arun Jaitley has failed to please the farmers here even when main focus of his budget remained rural economy and agriculture.

The union minister in his Budget 2018-19 speech on Thursday had outlined a slew of measures to boost agricultural production and rural economy. The announcement of setting the Minimum Support Price (MSP)at 1.5 times the cost of production of the kharif (summer) crops, has not amused the farmers much.

Terming the measures nothing but hogwash, the farmers talking to Free Press here called the MSP scheme as impractical and unimplementable. The government whether it is Central or state is making fool of farmers. They are playing the role of dictatorship.

“The drubbing which the BJP received in the rural areas of Gujarat in the elections has suddenly woken up the central government to the miseries of the farmers,” said Satyendra Upadhyaya, who after quitting his teaching job at Jawaharlal Nehru Agriculture University, Jabalpur, has taken up farming. “Announcements are fine but as they say, devil is in the detail”, said Upadhyaya who is now undertaking farming at his ancestral land near Ganj Basoda in Vidisha district.

Upadhyaya wonders from where the government will arrange crores of rupees needed to purchase farm produce at MSP. Food grains can be put to use but what about other crops. “Suppose the government procures a couple of lakh tons of cotton; storing it would be a logistical nightmare. And what will the government do with it?”

D B Tiwari, a farmer from Sagar says that he does not know how the government would calculate the input cost of crops. India is such a large country with huge regional variations that arriving at an acceptable formula for calculating input cost would be next to impossible. ‘What Jaitley has announced is nothing but hogwash. The MSP scheme is impractical and unimplementable”, he opines.

“ Ye sab bekar ki batein hai …(all these things are worthless.). The budget is not pro-farmer. The farmers will be benefited from the MSP schemes, announced by government in the budget because government decides cost of produce. They don’t accept the price at which we fix the cost of farm produce,” said Kamlesh Dhakad, a farmer from Bhopal. He also adds that the Bhawantar scheme of state government is also failed to benefit farmers because government gives only 3% difference on 10 qunital of our farm produce. “What will we do of left 7quinatl of our produce,” he says.

“Not at all, the budget is not in favour of farmers. Neither central nor state government is thinking about the welfare of farmers. That’s why farmers are committing suicide and taking poison. The government is misguiding and making fool of farmers by launching such schemes. It is only on paper. The ground reality is something different,” said Purushottam Lodhi, a farmer from Udaipura Tehsil of Raisen district.

He said that to get benefit of procurement of farm produce at MSP it is mandatory to have account only in Corporative bank. The farmers having the account at other nationalised bank can’t get benefit of the scheme. The government is making fool of us and acting like dictators, says Lodhi. Similarly, another farmer from the same place Mukesh Sharma said, “ The budget is not in favour of farmers. There is no clear policy as when and how the scheme will be implement. Also, there is no clear and solid strategy. The farmers are very angry with the government.”