Portal raj hinders Haryana farmers’ MSP access

THERE is a particular kind of cruelty that hides behind the portal and paperwork. It does not announce itself with a loud decree. It does not openly cancel the minimum support price (MSP) to farmers.

Instead, it builds — layer upon layer of procedure — a wall so high, so bureaucratically intricate, that the farmer cannot climb it. By the time he gives up and sells his crop at whatever price is offered in mandis, the government washes its hands. That is precisely what the Haryana government is doing in the current wheat procurement season, which started on April 1.

We must call it what it is: a back-door, brick-by-brick dismantling of MSP — not through legislation, but through administrative suffocation. Consider what the government has euphemistically called vehicle identification.

Every farmer bringing wheat to a mandi must display the tractor-trolley's vehicle number, have it photographed at the mandi gate, upload that photo to the government portal and only then receive a gate pass to proceed.

On the surface, this sounds like reasonable digitalisation. In practice, it is a trap built on a single false assumption — that every Haryana farmer owns a tractor-trolley. Over 85% of India's farmers are small and marginal, holding less than two hectares.

In Haryana, where land fragmentation is accelerating, the vast majority do not own tractors, let alone trolleys. They hire them — from neighbours, from contractors — season after season, at market rates they can barely afford.

Now ask the question the government refuses to answer: if a farmer hires different tractor-trolleys at different times, as most farmers must and do, will the portal accept the same farmer appearing with different vehicle numbers on each visit? It will not. It has not been designed to do so. And there is a reason for that design choice.

There is, moreover, a second and even deeper contradiction. The Haryana government itself does not permit tractor-trolleys for commercial operations — meaning hiring them out for crop transportation is technically illegal under existing state regulations.

So the farmer who hires a trolley is arriving at the mandi gate in a "commercially operated" vehicle that the law does not recognise. The hired trolley cannot get a transport permit. Without a transport permit, the vehicle number cannot be verified. Without verification, no gate pass. Without a gate pass, no entry. The farmer goes home. The trader waits outside the gate, cash in hand, ready to buy at Rs 400-500/quintal below MSP.

The complications do not stop at the vehicle gate. Farmers must first register on the 'Meri Fasal Mera Byora' portal — a prerequisite that excludes the tens of thousands of elderly, marginalised and digitally illiterate farmers who lack smartphone access.

Gate passes must be generated via the e-Kharid mobile app, which requires an unreliable Internet connection in the villages of Haryana's farming belt.

The mandis are geo-fenced, so any GPS discrepancy, network glitch, or server outage can prevent a farmer from entering, with no offline fallback or appeal. Biometric verification of the farmer or an authorised representative is mandatory at the time of bidding — a step that routinely fails when the fingerprints of farmers, worn by years of field work, do not register cleanly on scanners.

Each of these requirements, individually, might pass as a modernisation measure. Together, they form a deliberate gauntlet, and the farmer at the end of it is not a beneficiary; he is the target.

Whole wheat procurement has received some attention; the government's abandonment of mustard farmers is the quieter, and in some ways more complete, betrayal. Mustard growers across Mahendargarh, Rewari, Bhiwani, Hisar and Fatehabad are being forced to sell their crop to private traders at prices well below the MSP of Rs 5,950 per quintal. Procurement by government agencies under NAFED and state bodies has been either absent or tokenistic at most mandis this season.

When a farmer has no functional access to MSP procurement — due to registration barriers, lack of a trolley, the simple intimidation of a system designed to exhaust him — he will sell to whoever is standing in front of him. He times his arrival to coincide with the government's absence.

The most damning evidence of intent, however, is numerical and undeniable. The Haryana government has quietly revised its wheat procurement target downward — from 80 lakh metric tonnes to 72 lakh metric tonnes for the 2026-27 season.

That reduction of 8 lakh tonnes, at the current MSP of Rs 2,585 per quintal, amounts to approximately Rs 2,068 crore in MSP income that Haryana's farmers will not receive from government procurement.

That money does not evaporate. It transfers, as it does every year when procurement falls short, to private traders who absorb the surplus at prices Rs 400 to Rs 500 below MSP. This is not an administrative calibration. It is a state-engineered transfer of wealth — from the farmer to the trader — executed quietly, without announcement, by a state government.

The Central government has, for over a decade, refused to translate the Swaminathan Commission's landmark recommendation into law — that MSP be set at C2+50%, meaning a guaranteed 50% profit over the comprehensive cost of cultivation, including land rental. Even the current MSP of Rs 2,585 per quintal for wheat falls short of this benchmark in most Haryana districts when input costs, labour, diesel and irrigation are accurately accounted. Even within this already limited framework, procurement targets are being cut.

The farmer who grows this country's food does not have the luxury of a portal, a gate pass timeline or a biometric scanner. The farmer has a field, a family, a loan and a harvest ripening right now under the April sun. Governance is not about building systems that protect the government itself from accountability, transparency and efficiency.