The Maharashtra government has dismissed as ‘misleading’, reports on its plans to jail traders found buying farm produce below the Minimum Support Price (MSP).
State Co-Operation Minister Subhash Deshmukh and Secretary for Agriculture and Cooperation Bijay Kumar clarified there was no such proposal tabled for approval or deliberation, much less for clearing by the State Cabinet. Instead, the Cabinet members had, on August 21, discussed a proposal to impose strict penalties for the violation of the Statutory Minimum Price (SMP) under the Agricultural Produce and Livestock Marketing (Promotion and Facilitating) Act, 2017, officials said.
Nearly 300 Agriculture Produce Market Committees (APMCs) across Maharashtra are tense over the reports, but the government has vehemently denied them. The SMP, it said, is announced by the Central government based on the cost of cultivation estimated by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices. This is the basic price that sugar mills must pay sugarcane growers, officials said.
“We do not even know how the newspapers interpreted the attempted changes in the rules related to the SMP as those related to MSP. This is a gross misuse of the freedom of the press. The government has no intention whatsoever of the regulating the MSP, which is already regulated by the APMC Act. We don’t know the source of that information. They should have checked with us,” he said.
Senior officials in the Chief Minister Office said the decision concerning the SMP would be tabled before the Maharashtra Assembly for deliberation before any call was taken on it. “We have just proposed to include the fines and jail term on the SMP for those found not paying the State Advisory Price (SAP) and SMP,” a senior official said. This is limited to cane so far, he said.
The eventual plan
The SMP for sugarcane is linked to several factors such as cost of growing cane, alternative crops, fair price of sugar and the yield of cane (sugar content). States also announce a price called the SAP, which is usually higher than the SMP. Cane mills pay the higher of SMP or SAP to farmers. “Sometimes for those crops on which MSP is not announced, an SMP must be imposed so that the farmers are not cheated. This is our eventual plan, and with this intention, we had discussed in the cabinet the decisions related to SMP,” said the minister. But SMP, he said, “is not MSP.”
“According to our plans, the SMP could in future be declared for some crops via an ordinance, for example, the tribals can use the declared SMP for fair sale of their specific produce in the market,” the Minister said. The existing Acts and rules already have provisions for violation of the MSP, he said. “We request the traders to take back the protest they have initiated based on this misguided information.”
APMC traders said they would take back the protest but the government must nevertheless take immediate steps to improve existing MSP mechanisms. “They don’t even have a system to measure the produce that comes to the market,” said Ashok Agrawal, member of the APMC, Latur market.
