India is a nation dependent on farming, if considering it as business farming is one of the best businesses but there are some problems associated with current condition of farmers and currently in India, it is miserable at best and there are several reasons for it:
- Dependency on the government to established MSP
- Farmers in India do not take farming as a business
- Middlemen or Dalal decide prices rather than farmers.
- Low prices to farmers and middlemen earn better than farmers.
Now coming to think about prices the actual buyer, buyer doesn’t get lower prices but gets prices what sellers and middlemen decide.
Middlemen go in groups with pre-decided prices reach to farmers and farmers have to sell whatever they grow to dalals with lower prices so the farmers do not get prices that can actually help them or the prices which they want to sell their growing.
If we take price of every seed, which is being sold to farmers plus cost of water and electricity plus price of diesel which farmers use in their vehicles on field then price of whatever they grow, will be higher than what they get in local market. Problem here is middlemen which go to farmer with lower prices and farmer has to agree with their prices because farmer has to sell for money and to keep business alive.
Coming to the problem of middlemen it is not possible for the government to remove middlemen overnight, so there should be a way that farmers get prices they want and then farming will grow as a business.
A simple answer is Farmers Market, which every country has where farmers grow and farmers or their adult kids sell whatever grows at the prices they decide.
There are some problems with this system and the first problem is water and for the government will have to connect each and every river. 64% of water goes back inside the sea every year so connecting rivers should be a priority and after that availability of water won’t be a problem anymore
Second problem is there is not a place where farmers can sell at prices which they decide so government will have to open farmers market like every developed country in the world but problem is, people would get scared that it’d suddenly increase prices of vegetables and fruits would suddenly reach to unthinkable levels. At this point government can intervene, this way the government will not have to decide prices but government would just decide prices should not go over more than 2-2.5 times the prices of grown vegetables or fruits.
For this BJP will have to call a nationwide meeting of every minister who is handling farming in his/her state and that minister would describe what prices should farmers get and where he’d establish markets with a fixed price.
Minister will also get a list of farming and what his/her state is growing that way this would be faster to decide.
Another problem is not every farmer has his/her own carrying vehicle, and places to keep whatever they grow like cold storage or large spaces to store vegetable/fruit. The government can help here by purchasing vehicles for this purpose and can support cold storage financially so farmers can store their growing at minimal prices.
The last problem is where to open these stores and for that either local market can be opened for farmers or in outskirts of city markets can be established. People living in the city can reach and purchase. Local shop owners too can reach and then sell at little profit of their own so prices do not go way too high for final customers.
This way government won’t have to waive off loans as it has been happening from decades and that way bank NPAs too won’t increase which in end normal people have to pay with increased bills of water, electricity, and petrol as we can see currently in Rajasthan, my state.
I hope this scheme would properly be executed so farmers who should get respect for hard work they do will get respect and they will not have to reach out in cities to work as labor on sites because this is what I see on the construction site where I work. Then again this is like solving all the problems of farmers and that’s going to destroy a vote bank which currently just looks to government to solve all the problems and just deciding MSP is not the solution at all but removing middlemen and establishing market surely will improve conditions of farmers.
I hope this reaches to concerned officials.
Jai Hind
Vande Matram
Bharat Mata ki Jai
