4 petitions in 3 months: Karnataka now urges Centre to address Bengal gram ‘price collapse’

This was of particular concern as the harvest of Bengal gram intensifies between January and March, the chief minister said, adding that “there is a genuine apprehension of further price collapse, aggravating rural distress”.

“This price erosion is not merely a market aberration, it is a human crisis,” Siddaramaiah said in the letter. He has urged the Union government to “immediately accord approval for procurement of Bengal gram under the Price Support Scheme (PSS)” and direct central nodal agencies such as the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India and the National Cooperative Consumers Federation of India Ltd to operationalise procurement centres in the state.

The crop is cultivated in 14 of the 31 districts in Karnataka in an area spanning 9.24 lakh hectares.

This is the fourth time in the last three months that the Karnataka government has petitioned the Centre to address anomalies in procurement prices for crops. Following an unrest of sugarcane farmers in November, the Karnataka government had submitted a memorandum to the Centre saying that the sugarcane pricing issues rose from “central policy levers”. Weeks later, Siddaramaiah had urged the Centre to procure maize and green gram in order to resolve the crisis caused by a steep crash in their prices. In the first week of December, Siddaramaiah, in another letter to the Centre, highlighted delays in approving MSP procurement for toor dal.