Rajiv Kumar Ojha does not know which is more stressful: harvesting a decent crop or trying to sell it. “You might find it funny, but my troubles begin after I get a good harvest at the end of the cropping season,” he said, sitting in the verandah of his dilapidated house in Chaumukh, a village in north-central Bihar.
Ojha, 47, cultivates paddy in the kharif season (June-November), and wheat and maize during rabi (December-March) on his five-acre farmland in the village, located in Muzaffarpur district’s Bochaha taluka . “Weather, water, labour and many more things need to come together for us to get a good harvest,” he told me in November 2020. “But even after that, there is no market. I have to sell my stock to the commission agent in the village, and I have to sell it at the price he fixes.” The agent in turn sells it to a wholesale trader for a commission.
In 2019, Ojha sold his stock of raw paddy at the rate of Rs. 1,100 per quintal – this was 39 per cent less than the MSP (minimum support price) of Rs. 1,815 at that time. “I didn’t have an option. The agents always buy at a lower rate because they know we can’t go anywhere [to sell]. So we hardly make any profit,” he said.
A farmer in Bihar invests Rs. 20,000 on an acre of paddy, said Ojha. “I get 20-25 quintals of harvest on an acre. At 1,100 rupees a quintal, I can make a profit of 2,000-7,000
— source ruralindiaonline.org | Parth M.N. | May 1, 2021