Terminating MSP is also not a solution. Punjab and Haryana farmers grow wheat and rice bcz they are getting MSP on them, for other crops they are not getting and sometimes it remains unsold. Like i remembered sometimes ago, govt asked farmers to Grow pulses but it remained unsold and govt pickup wheat and rice again. Whose fault is this? From next year, farmers start growing wheat and rice again.
Instead of terminating MSP, why not govt announce the demand for each crop before the season and declare the MSP for each crop and they will pick up the crop according to demand only. And let local Mandis handle the % of sharecrop produced at each area like produce rice where ground water level is high.
Why farmers will not produce any other crop if they are getting MSP and govt wont have to handle with extra production.
And for the private sector, let me give an example again. Pepsico has asked farmers to grow potatoes for their lays, but when the time comes to buy them, bcz of some rotten potatoes, they said the quality of potatoes are not good and they will give less price due to this reason. Farmers cannot decide the quality of their crops, one or two potatoes will always be bad. You cannot control that.
Pls understand the context under which MSP was brought in. For those who came in late, while in the first 2-3 decades after independence , India was hugely dependent on outside aid for foodstuff, it was decided to take up self sufficiency in production of food grains with priority.
Post independence Punjab ( unified Punjab including Haryana + HP) was the prime candidate as since British times these areas benefitted from having advanced irrigation & power facilities which in turn owed itself to the munificence of nature what with 7 rivers flowing thru it & the canal colonies created which arguably was more in what's now Pakistani Punjab apart from better education.
Post independence, the biggest dam project the Bhakra Nangal was conceived, designed & executed precisely for these reasons in the Punjab. Hence, the Green revolution saw itself being inaugurated in Punjab & Haryana with these States emerging as the bread baskets of India .
Prosperity leads to more more prosperity as the income this earned led to creation of better infrastructure viz power, warehouses communication & transportation facilities etc. This ensured that P&H continued their dominance in food production which in turn lead to massive subsidies both direct & indirect which has continued till date.
Unfortunately, that's where things stopped . Instead of using this prosperity as a platform & springboard to vault into the industrial & services sector, partly due to the insurgency issue through the 80's & 90's & thru sheer lack of foresight & leadership subsequently leading to where we are today, where agriculture has reached a saturation point & cannot absorb new entrants into the working force there, has become inefficient in its mode of production & has over a period of time lost it's status as the bread basket of the country where other states are producing the same food grains at a cheaper rate of input cost & therefore sale which both P&H can't compete with & had no need to do so as long as MSP & picking up of their stocks by the FCI was guaranteed.
P&H enjoyed it's pre eminence only because in the 70's & 80's the other regions of India couldn't ensure that we could be self sufficient in good grain production without P&H. When this was achieved throughout the 90's & later decades, it was only a matter of time before those steps you're seeing now were enacted. You see, governments are opportunistic. As long as they needed P&H to ensure we were self sufficient in food grains production, they indulged in them. Once that need was removed, markets being unforgiving, this move being on the cards since 2 decades, had to be executed. It came to be so now.
While your points about the government not being clear in its plans procurement & communication w.r.t crop diversity is well taken, tell me how will farmers leading a hand to mouth existence in other parts of the country for whom MSP is a dream , who've had no choice but to sell it to the APMC at rates determined by the cartel there which isn't even half the MSP & for whom these laws promise a better income & consequently a better future look at the actions of the farmers from P& H .
It makes for horrible optics. Besides, even if the GoI bows down to the demands of the farmers from P&H & repeals those laws which is highly unlikely except for some cosmetic changes , do you think the farmers from the rest of the nation will take it lying down, now that the genie has been let out of the bottle?
This is the gist of the story of agriculture in P&H today.
www.google.com
