If the government’s minium support price (MSP) programme helped in properly creating a minimum floor price, farmers across 11 major agricultural states would have, on average, earned almost Rs 1,900 crore more by selling their produce. According to The Wire’s analysis of data from Agmarknet – the government’s price information system, which sources price and quantity arrival data from around 3,000 wholesale mandis across the country – farmers on average were denied at least Rs 1,881 crore by having to sell their produce below the MSP in October and November.
The most sizeable ‘losses’ were in the sale of maize. Prices were hovering between Rs 1,100 and Rs 1,550 a quintal – as against the MSP of Rs 1,850, and the total income denied to farmers in October and November was a staggering Rs 485 crore. For groundnut, due to sales below the MSP, farmers suffered notional losses to the tune of Rs 333 crore.
Even for paddy, sales below the MSP meant that in some major producing states – other than Punjab and Haryana – the total loss of income was Rs 220 crore. In all other major paddy producing states – Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Telangana – the average prices were 15% below the MSP.
— source thewire.in | Kabir Agarwal, Dheeraj Mishra | 08/Dec/2020