Bridge the gap

THE ongoing lockdown has disrupted activities in the agriculture and allied sectors, even though the Centre has granted exemptions and relaxations to farm operations. The enormity of the disruption can’t be overestimated — about 70 per cent of India’s rural households are dependent primarily on agriculture for their livelihood. The disconnect between the Central and state governments was visible during Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar’s interaction with the states via video-conferencing earlier this week. Tomar asked them to sensitise their field agencies on the exemptions and allow the movement of farm produce, fertilisers and machinery. Such an exercise should have been undertaken right away when the lockdown was imposed over two weeks ago.

Farmers are facing problems on every front, be it availability of inputs, harvesting, inter-state movement of farm produce or procurement. Delhi’s Azadpur mandi, Asia’s biggest fruit and vegetable market, has witnessed a drop of over 50 per cent in the arrival of major fruits and vegetables in the past fortnight or so. With demand far outstripping supply, the prices of vegetable and fruits are set to spiral out of control.

The arrivals have been hit partially due to the Centre’s focus on decongesting mandis to ward off coronavirus. With the aim of reducing the need for farmers to travel all the way to wholesale markets for selling their produce, the government recently enabled direct trading from warehouses as well as collection centres of farmer-producer organisations under the e-NAM (electronic national agriculture market) platform. However, this e-project, which was launched four years ago to achieve the ambitious goal of ‘one nation, one market’, continues to face hiccups in view of technological constraints and lack of awareness among farmers. A proposal by the Punjab Government regarding doorstep procurement of wheat has been dismissed as unfeasible by farmers as well as arhtiyas, who aver that there is no substitute for well-equipped mandis, provided adequate safety measures are in place on the premises. Centre-state and inter-state coordination is the need of the hour to ensure that the bumper harvest benefits all, right from the farmer to the consumer.

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