Harvest Of Losses

Will the loan waiver announced by the Maharashtra government help alleviate farmers' plight?

- Nidhi Jamwal

SQUATTING ON the floor with his head held between his hands, 63-year-old Anant Niture, a small farmer from Sonwati village in Latur, stares at the ground. At the beginning of the kharif season in June 2016, Niture sowed tur or arhar dal (pigeon pea) on his two-acre (one acre equals 0.4 ha) unirrigated land. Then the market price of tur was as high as ₹10,00012,000 per quintal (100 kg). Niture hoped to finally make some profit after three years of consecutive droughts and untimely hailstorms that had hit the state’s Marathwada region.

However, all his hopes dashed when within a couple of months the domestic market price of tur crashed to an all time low of ₹4,000 per quintal. For the first time, the market price of tur fell below the minimum support price (msp) of ₹5,050 in 2016-17. “Last year, there was a scarcity of pulses in the country and the prices had skyrocketed. The agriculture department told us to sow more tur to reduce dependence on imports. See, what happened after we followed the government’s advice,” he says caustically. Agriculture officials blame untimely import of tur for the price crash in the domestic market. “The imported tur flooded the domestic market around October last year, bringing down the prices. Our farmers suffered a great deal as they harvested tur crop two months after the glut,” says Mohan Gojamgunde, agriculture officer of Latur.

India is the world’s highest producer of tur. But, because of a gap between demand and supply, it is also the largest importer of the pulse. As per the March 2017 Commodity Profile of Pulses, the government was expecting a high tur production this year—4.23 million tonnes, up from 2.56 million tonnes in 2015-16. Despite this knowledge, there was a 24 per cent increase in