The similarity between Modi govt and old Hero Honda ads

Prime Minister Narendra Modi | Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

Narendra Modi government promised historic MSP to farmers, and then forgot about it.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government reminds me of the famous Hero Honda advertisement of yesteryears: “Fill it. Shut it. Forget it”.

Under the current dispensation, it is: “Tell it. Sell it. Forget it”. This pretty much sums up all the major initiatives of the Modi government. Grand announcement. Publicity blitz. And then, complete amnesia. This is the story of Swachh Bharat, Make in India and Namo Gange. My friend Anupam insists that this government is all about launching — and lynching.

The fate of Modi government’s famous promise of “historic MSP” to the farmers illustrates this tell-it-sell-it-forget-it approach. Remember, in the Budget speech this year, the finance minister made a grand announcement that the government has decided to honour its commitment on cost plus 50 per cent as the floor level of the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for agricultural commodities.

The central government announces MSP for 24 major crops (excluding cash crops, fruits and veggies) at the time of kharif and rabi sowing, so as to assure the farmers that they would get at least this much price, should the markets fail to give better prices. In practice, this “minimum” price has become the maximum price the farmers can hope to get, in case the government remembers its promise. More often than not, it doesn’t. Shanta Kumar Committee appointed by the Government of India to Reform FCI found that merely 6 per cent farmers can benefit from this MSP.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley announced that in future, the MSP shall be fixed so as to give farmers at least 50 per cent returns over their cost of production. He also announced that the government would come up with a new procurement policy to ensure that all farmers can sell their crop for at least the MSP. The Niti Aayog was asked to come up with a new plan.

The declaration was widely welcomed. Farmer groups pointed out a sleight of hand in Arun Jaitley’s announcement: he had cleverly shifted the definition of “cost of production” from comprehensive cost (C2, in official lingo) to partial cost (A2+FL) and had cheated the farmers. But the media ignored them. It also overlooked the fact that a few months ago, the agriculture minister had claimed in the Lok Sabha that his party never made the promise that Jaitley was now seeking to honour! Also, that the government had filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court in 2015 saying that such a promise cannot be fulfilled as it would “distort the market”.

Then came the hard sell. This “historic” bonanza was announced, not once or twice but thrice, each time with the same fanfare. Jaitley’s speech was greeted by screaming headlines, outpouring of congratulatory messages and social media bursts. In July, the same decision was celebrated afresh as the government announced kharif MSP along the lines already committed in the Budget. Once again, Modi was congratulated for the ‘historic’ raise in MSP. The media largely overlooked the fact that the declaration was inordinately delayed. The UPA government had announced much higher raise in MSP in 2008-09. Then came the third announcement to implement the promise and another round of celebrations. Grandly titled PM-AASHA, this policy had two small pilot components to the existing procurement policy. This tweak took Niti Aayog seven months. It was celebration time: billboards, PM’s maan ki baat, TV and print ads and, of course, sarkari PR masquerading as news.

And then official amnesia kicked in. Since September end, kharif crop has started arriving in the market. The government began its procurement operations from 1 October. We are in the middle of the marketing season now. Except for east India, farmers all over the country are bringing their produce – bajra, maize, jowar, moong (green gram), urad (black gram), soya bean and cotton – to agricultural mandis. Paddy arrival has just begun.

But the farmers got pretty little from the ‘historic’ declaration. Last week, I sat with farmers of Rajasthan at a public hearing organised by the Soochana Evam Rozgar Adhikar Abhiyan in Jaipur. I thought the government would put its best foot forward here on the eve of the assembly election. Not a single farmer that I spoke to had sold bajra, the largest crop of the state in this season, at official MSP of Rs 1,950 per quintal. Farmers are forced to sell it to the private trader for around Rs 1,300 per quintal.

Reason: Government procurement had not begun anywhere. There is token government procurement of moong, but it is an obstacle race to become eligible –bring Aadhaar identity plus Bhamashah card (Rajasthan’s new multi-purpose card), land papers and procure (actually purchase) verification from Patwari and then hope that the e-mitra window will be open that day for prior online registration. The situation was a little better in Haryana mandis that I visited the previous week, but prior online registration was still the biggest bottleneck, keeping a majority of farmers from getting the MSP.

Economists would dismiss this as anecdotal evidence of a biased political activist.

So here’s official, statistical, big data evidence. The ministry of agriculture’s website AgMarkNet provides a daily record of official transactions in each of the nearly 1,500 official mandis. It publishes data on quantum sold and the average ‘modal’ price for each commodity in each market, daily. AgMarkNet does not record a large number of informal transactions. Hence the real price that farmers get is way below the one reported here. But this is what the official picture looked like on 24 October for all major commodities except paddy for which it is still early days.

The official data nails the lie of the MSP. Every single commodity is selling way below the official MSP. Cotton is the only crop that hovers close to or even above the MSP, thanks to reduction in supply due to widespread damage to the crop this year. Otherwise, the farmer suffers a loss of around Rs 2,000 per quintal for moong, urad and arhar and around Rs 500 per quintal for all other commodities. In many crops — jowar, moong, urad, arhar — the price realised by the farmers falls well short of their officially estimated cost (C2). In the first three weeks since the beginning of official purchase, farmers had undersold their produce to the tune of Rs 1,149 crore as compared to the official MSP.

So far, the government has maintained radio silence on this scandal. In the public domain, there is no tracking, no review, no accountability for implementation of this ‘historic’ announcement. Informally, government officials say that the AASHA scheme will take at least six months to come into operation, something they forgot to mention when the scheme was launched.

Some media reports have published the truth of this failure. But most of the regime-friendly media is busy asking theoretical questions about whether MSP is a good route to take. (Clearly it is not, but that’s not the point right now). Meanwhile, the regime has unleashed its low-end, dispensable ‘experts’ to attack those who seek to hold a mirror to the government. Trolls have created a lot of noise to distract public attention away from the truth.

The PM has not spoken a word about what happened to his ‘historic’ promise. For him, the game was over with the telling-and-selling. As they say in Hindi: Khel khatam, paisa hajam.

The author is National President of Swaraj India.