Farmer associations and labour unions will hold joint struggles to unseat the ‘‘anti-farmer’‘ and ‘‘corporate-friendly Narendra Modi government” at the Centre, said All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) national general secretary Vijoo Krishnan on Friday.
Addressing a farmers’ meeting here, he said the three Farm Acts brought earlier and the amendments to the Electricity Act were all part of the game-plan to squeeze farmers out of cultivation. ‘‘It is in this context that united struggles to ensure statutory backing for the Minimum Support Price (MSP) regime with assured procurement has to intensified”. Also, smart meters on farm pump sets, planned with an ‘‘ulterior motive’‘ to withdraw power subsidy over a period, should be stopped at any cost, he asserted.
The MSP announced by the BJP-led Union government for the Kharif season 2023-24 was not at all remunerative and far from the C2 plus 50% suggested by noted agriculture scientist M.S. Swaminathan.
He said farmers unions under the banner of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha would hold nationwide demonstrations on August 8 followed by a series of protests in the run up to the Lok Sabha elections as the BJP-led government at the Centre inflicted massive damage on farmer incomes.
‘‘It discourages farmers from investing in agriculture, let alone encouraging crop diversification. Rather than doubling farmer incomes as promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, rising input costs coupled with unfair MSP are pushing large sections of the farmers especially, the small, marginal, middle farmers as well as tenants, into debt, leading to their suicide,’‘ he said.
The loss to paddy farmers on account of denial of fair price amounted to over ₹13,500 crore and to cotton growers ₹28,000 crore. Moreover, the Commission of Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) underestimated costs for various States and used the all India weighted average of these underestimated costs to compute the MSP.
The routine projections done by CACP failed to take into account the increasing input costs or factor in the inflation. The Centre did not bother to take even the recommendations of States ruled by the BJP into consideration, he contended.
