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Who Dumped Potatoes on Lucknow Streets?

Subodh Varma |
Potato prices have crashed, farmers are not lifting potatoes from cold storages and the govt. is blissfully indifferent.
Potatoe

Image Courtesy: Tribune

On 6 January, residents of UP’s capital Lucknow woke up to a bizarre sight. Potatoes lay strewn on some of the prominent roads and crossings, including the Vidhan Sabha Marg, the VVIP Guest House and other places. Lucknow’s authorities went into disaster management mode with police, fire brigade and an army of civic workers mobilised to clean up the roads of potato piles.

"There was a truck which had sacks of potato and it started throwing potatoes in various parts of the city early this morning,” explained Lucknow District Magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma.

People would have thought that this was someone’s idea of a prank but the govt. officials and ministers who rushed in for damage control let the cat out of the bag. Sharma said it was the "...work of anti-social elements. It is not very clear whether this is a work of farmers or any farmer organisation...” A state government spokesman said, "This was not done by farmers, but by miscreants." Agriculture minister Surya Prartap Sahi said that it is a “deliberate attempt to malign the image of the Yogi Adityanath government”.

And then, one farmers’ organisation carefully took the story forward. Shekhar Dixit of the Rashtriya Kisan Manch said that “Today it is the potato farmers who have thrown potatoes on the streets of Lucknow, tomorrow it may be the sugar cane farmers....”

Why would potato farmers in UP, which produces about 30% of India’s potatoes, be angry enough to throw potatoes on the capital city’s streets?

The answer is evident from potato production and price figures. In 2017, potato production was a near record of about 47 million tonnes. The record is of 2014-15 when 48 million tonnes were produced. But the prices of this essential vegetable have crashed this year. According to reports, wholesale potato prices at mandis have crashed to as low as 20 paise per kg.

In Agra, one of the biggest potato producing centers, wholesalers were offering Rs.10 for a 50-kg bag of potatoes to farmers in December last year. In July, the price was Rs.400 for the same bag. Similar stories are pouring in from various potato producing centres across the country.

According to the farmers in Siliguri in W.Bengal, the cost of production of potatoes is about Rs.45-50,000 per acre. This excludes loan repayment and irrigation costs, and also family labour. The yield is about 20 metric tonnes per acre. The price they got from the traders was Rs.4000 per metric tonne. That is, about Rs.80,000 per acre.

This is “leaving hardly anything as my take home,” said Jiban Mandal a potato farmer from Siliguri, reported Economic Times. West Bengal reported a 22% jump in potato production at 11 million tonnes in 2016-17, leading to a price crash. Prices have been as low as Rs 2.40 per kg at the farm-gate level against a cost of production of Rs 4.5 - 5 per kg.

In Punjab too potato farmers were facing losses as they were getting a price of Rs.1 per kg instead of their expectation of at least Rs.5-6. In north and central Gujarat’s potato producing belt of Banaskantha, Patan and Gandhinagar farmers sold potatoes for Rs.2-3 per kg as against their production cost of Rs.5, excluding cold storage costs, according to reports.

But potatoes can be stored in cold storages – so why not do that? The answer is that last year’s potato stored in cold storages needs to be retrieved – on payment basis – by farmers to vacate the space. In UP, one 50 kg bag of potatoes can be stored for Rs.110. Usually farmers retrieve their stored potatoes after getting some money from their current crops. However, cold storages are still full with last year’s potatoes because the farmers don’t have money to pay. This has led cold storage owners to even switch off power in some districts like Agra.

In fact, when UP agriculture minister Sahi reacted to the Lucknow potato dumping incident by saying that these potatoes were “rotten” and “rejected by the mandi” he unknowingly raised the possibility that they were dumped by some angry and frustrated cold storage owner who was getting rid of his stored and unretrieved potatoes in this unique way.

The Modi govt. and his party’s state govts. are continuing to ignore thewarning signs from rural areas – farmers are angry at not getting justified returns on their produce. This has led to agitations across the country and the historic Kisan Sansad in Delhi in November last. The potato dumping incident is just another brick in the wall that Modi and Yogi are building around themselves.

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