NEW DELHI: Supreme Court on Monday sought responses from the Centre and states on a PIL seeking a sufficient increase in the minimum support price (MSP) for the procurement of grains to enable farmers to recover at least the input cost and prevent thousands of them from ending their lives out of financial distress. A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi said examining this matter and issuing any direction would “amount to rewriting the economic policy” of the govt, which includes providing free ration to nearly two-thirds of the nation’s population. Appearing for three petitioners, advocate Prashant Bhushan said, “Indian farmers are facing a terrible financial crisis because of being unable to sell their produce even at their actual cost of production. This has led to large-scale suicides of farmers, with over 17,000 farmers having died by suicide in Maharashtra alone in the last five years.” Bhushan said that though the M S Swaminathan Commission, in its report, had recommended payment of input cost along with 50% of it as profit to make farming viable in India, the MSP fixed year after year for crops was considerably less than the weighted average cost of production. The petitioners said that while the govt remained the largest procurer of rice and wheat at MSP, other crops were hardly procured even at the MSP. Bhushan said though free ration should continue for two-thirds of the population, “it has led to destruction of the agricultural market for these crops”. “The provision of free wheat and rice under the Food Security Act, covering roughly two-thirds of the population, has also resulted in artificially depressing the demand for other competing food crops, particularly millets, etc., which are not being purchased by people because of the availability of virtually free rations of wheat and rice,” the petitioners said. “This has also resulted in depressed consumption of healthy crops like millets and has also exacerbated the health crisis in the country. If, instead of providing free wheat and rice and oil under the Food Security Act, the govt were to provide some direct cash transfer (equivalent to the subsidy for wheat and rice), it would still lead to an open market for farmers and would also lead to an increased consumption of healthy crops like millets etc,” they added. They said the India-US trade deal allowing the import of agricultural produce free of import duty would further accentuate the distress of farmers, which can be addressed by fixing a lucrative MSP coupled with the procurement of crops other than wheat and rice by the govt.
