Kutch farmers ‘not in favour’ of nano urea, oppose mandatory sale

Secondly, how will one spray this fertiliser on the foliage of crops like castor that grow 10 to 12-foot-high and fennel and mustard that grow up to six feet,” Karshan Varchand, president of Rapar taluka unit of RSS-backed Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), told The Indian Express on Monday. He had led the farmers’ protest at Khengargadh village on August 10.

Two days later, Union Minister Amit Shah laid the foundation stone of the world’s first plant for manufacturing liquid nano DAP fertiliser at Kandla near Gandhidham in Kutch. The plant will be set up over a 70-acre plot at Rs 350 crore. It will have production capacity to manufacture two lakh bottles (each containing 500-ml liquid nano DAP) per day and an annual production capacity of six crore bottles that the Union cooperation minister said will be equivalent to six crore bags of conventional granular DAP. Shah had also praised IFFCO for training youths for operating drones that can spray the liquid nano fertilisers.

However, Varchand said no such drones are available in Kutch. “We have not heard of IFFCO deploying any drone in Kutch for helping farmers spray liquid nano urea,” the farmer leader said, adding, “Applying conventional granular urea is easy as it can be broadcast by hands near the rows of plants. Broadcasting conventional urea granules in an acre may hardly take 30 minutes and it’s not a labourious job as a farmer doesn’t need to carry large quantities of granules at a time. But for spraying nano urea, a farmer will have to lug a spraying pump containing 15 litres of water on his shoulders and spraying the fertiliser in this manner in an acre will easily take four hours.

He also flagged that hiring a drone to spray the fertiliser would increase the cost of cultivation. The BKS leader emphasised that not all farmers are convinced about the efficacy of nano urea. “During a series of meetings that BKS organised across Kutch early this month, 60 per cent farmers opined that liquid nano urea is efficient but 40 others said results are poor. That said, IFFCO should do something to address these concerns,” said Varchand.

The Central and state governments have been urging farmers to switch to natural farming practices by replacing chemical fertilisers and pesticides with organic chemicals and compounds for stimulating plant growth and managing pests. At the same time, the governments are also in favour of nano fertilisers maintaining that they are amenable to precision application leading to much higher use efficiency and prevention of soil degradation.
IFFCO, one of the largest farmers’ cooperative bodies and a major chemical fertiliser player, launched its liquid nano urea in August 2021 after its plant for manufacturing such fertilisers became operational in Kalol near Gandhinagar. However, in December last year, the Central government informed the Lok Sabha that Gujarat stood 11th among the Indian states in terms of volumes of nano urea sales as farmers of the state purchased only 17.94 lakh bottles between August 2021 and December 12, 2022. On the other hand, farmers in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Punjab bought 79.19 lakh, 31.44 lakh, 30.67 lakh and 30.4 lakh bottles respectively.

IFFCO retails a 500-ml bottle of liquid nano urea at Rs 240 as against the subsidised rate of Rs 266 that farmers pay for a bag of 50 kg conventional granular urea. The actual value of a bag of urea in Gujarat works out to around Rs 3,500 of which the government shells out Rs 3,200-Rs 3,250 as the country is heavily dependent on imports for meeting its demand for chemical fertilisers. On the other hand, there is no direct subsidy component in the Rs 240 retail price of a 500-ml bottle of liquid nano urea.

KSSM chairman Kaya Varchand said they made it mandatory to purchase one bottle of nano urea on purchase of five bags of conventional urea from the beginning of the ongoing kharif season. “We did it as per instructions of the government and the IFFCO and despite the protests on Thursday, we are obliged to continue to do that,” the chairman said, adding, “However, farmers’ complaints about difficulty in application of nano urea are genuine and it will be helpful if IFFCO could tweak the nano urea formula and make it amenable to application through flood irrigation or micro irrigation.”

The KSSM chairman said that his cooperative society has sold around 1,200 bags of urea and around 800 bottles of nano urea. “While ours is a small village with a population of around 1,500, KSSM has only 300 farmer members. The average land holding is quite high and therefore, demand for urea remains high. This year, it is higher thanks to good rainfall early in the rainy season,” he said