Tomorrow

TINDWANI,BARABANKI: Hori Lal is worried. At 70, he is old and frail. He speaks, but is not easy to always comprehend. He walks slowly. But it is not just about himself that he is anxious. He is more concerned about the well-being of his family comprising three sons, their wives and 10 grand children.

“If one person falls sick, we are in trouble. There is no money,” says Lal, a farmer in Barabanki’s Tindwani village. Though just 20 kilometres from Lucknow, if you go by the lack of infrastructure and housing, the state of roads and power, the village could be anywhere in the remote interiors of UP.

Lal has a loan of ₹70,000, taken in 2015, and displays his Kisan Credit Card. He is also a potential beneficiary of the UP government’s loan waiver. Even as he waits to see whether his loan will indeed get written off as assured by Yogi Adityanath, the state’s new chief minister, he is already thinking of the next loan that he will likely be forced to take.

The fact that he may have to take another loan underlines the limitations of a loan waiver: it at best can be a temporary relief and is not a solution to the problem of low income farmers plagued by recurrent losses. In drought-hit TN, woman farmer battles for water

ECONOMICS OF INVESTMENT Lal, for example, has 6 bighas, an acre and a half, of land. The single-most important challenge for him, every season, is finding the resources to invest.

Take the economics of potato farming.

For an acre of land, Lal - like other potato farmers in Tindwani and elsewhere - has to first buy 20 sacks of seeds, with each sack containing 50 kg. Each kg costs around ₹ 24. And so the total cost for seeds is ₹24,000.

He then has to buy fertilisers of different kinds - a 5 kilo pack of zinc sulphate for ₹ 300, two packs of urea for ₹ 330 each, and five sacks of DAP (Diammonium Phosphate) for ₹1,150 each. The total cost of fertilisers comes to ₹6,710.

Lal then has to till and level the land, for which he hires a tractor for ₹500 per hour. Ten times, for two hours each, the tractor works on preparing the soil and land. Lal shells out another ₹10,000 for it.

He then sows the seeds, for which he has to hire the tractor again, which costs him ₹2000.

The farmers of Tindwani depend on pumps, run on diesel, for irrigation. Engines (which includes diesel rates) can be rented at ₹150 per hour; every acre requires at least four hours of irrigation; and it has to be irrigated seven times. The total cost for Lal on this head works out to ₹4,200.

The next step is the use of pesticides. Along with labour, which can be hired at ₹250 per day, the costs of this would come to ₹1,500.

The final step in the cycle is harvesting. A tractor is hired, at ₹2,000 per acre. Ten labourers are hired for the day, which costs ₹2,500. And 250 sacks have to be bought, at ₹ 20 each. Together, the entire harvesting exercise costs about ₹9,500.

But the cycle is not yet complete, for the farmers have to now transport and store their produce. Each sack is now packed in with 50 kgs of potato. The total produce from an acre, if all goes well, for Lal is about 125 quintals. The total cost of transporting and storing is close to ₹30,000.

And so what constitutes for Lal his basic investment, in one crop cycle, for an acre of land, from the stage of seeds to storing the produce, is approximately ₹87,910. With miscellaneous costs, this would go up to around ₹90,000.

THE LOSE-LOSE VENTURE

And then how much does Lal - or any other farmer of his kind - earn?

Till Yogi government came to power in March in UP, there was no Minimum Support Price for potato. In the last season, prices had fluctuated. Local Tindwani farmers told HT that it varied between ₹ 120 per sack of 50 kgs to ₹750 per sack. On an average, this would mean about ₹ 4.85 per kg of potato. At 125 quintals, this would mean a return of ₹60, 625 for an acre of potato produce.

“But it was erratic. Sometimes, we just left our produce at the storage because it cost more to pay them storage fees than what we would have recovered. So we got no money,” says Lal.

To offset this problem of wild fluctuation in prices, the Yogi government has introduced an MSP of ₹487 per quintal. But even if all his produce was acquired at this rate, it would give a farmer like Lal for an acre of his produce ₹60,875.

But remember his investment. It is close to ₹90,000. And so every acre of potato he cultivates, Lal is actually losing ₹30,000.

THE VICIOUS CYCLE

It is because of this gross mismatch between investment and income that farmers such as Lal end up taking loans. They do not have money for the seeds, the fertilisers, the irrigation, the pesticides, the sowing, the harvesting, the transport and storage because they have actually lost money.

Weddings in the family and emergencies like illnesses force them to sell part of their land holdings. November’s demonetisation did not help. It left even lesser money for investment and so the crop produce for some of the potato farmers of Tindwani went down.

The Yogi government’s decision to waive off loans up to ₹1 lakh, for small and marginal farmers with less than a hectare of land, may benefit Lal. But it won’t solve his problem.

Where would he get the money to make a fresh investment? “I will take a loan again. What else can I do?”

Why did he then cultivate potatoes in the first place?

Lal says he has no other option. “What else can we do? This is what my family has always done. This is all we know. At least, it gets us some vegetables for the home.” Lal says sending his sons out to work is not a solution: they were unskilled and would get ₹250 as labour charges for a day, which they could get in the village too. “At least we are together.”

It is this underlying driver of despair - limited cash reservoir to make investments, losses on produce because of low price, and thus a further push into deprivation - which is causing despair. The UP government’s decision to waive off loans has triggered a nation-wide demand for the same, but Lal knows it is only a matter of time before he is back, standing in the queue for another loan.