Opinion The Express View: For tomatoes, onions, potatoes, there must be price or income assurance for farmers

In the 2018-19 Union budget, the Narendra Modi government announced a new Operation Greens scheme in tomatoes, onions and potatoes (TOP) similar to the successful Operation Flood programme for milk. The aim was to develop a value chain for reducing extreme price fluctuations in the three basic vegetables, besides enhancing farmers’ realisations and improving their share of the consumer rupee. The scheme’s limited success can be seen from tomato now selling at Rs 7-10 per kg in Karnataka’s Kolar and Maharashtra’s Junnar wholesale markets, while retailing at Rs 26-27 in not-too-far-away Bengaluru and Pune. It’s more glaring in onions and potatoes. Recent protests against low prices by Maharashtra’s onion growers have included relay hunger fasts, stoppage of auctions at major mandis and a 200-km march to Mumbai. Potato farmers in Uttar Pradesh have, likewise, demanded that the government procure their tuber at Rs 10 per kg, as against the ruling Rs 6-6.5/kg market price at Agra.

Clearly, Operation Greens — whose scope was enlarged to 22 perishable grains in the 2021-22 budget — hasn’t quite delivered. Not even a third of the monies allocated for the scheme has been spent so far. The problem in TOPS, really, is not with the lack of storage or processing capacity. UP alone has some 2,406 cold stores with an aggregate capacity of 14.71 million tonnes (mt) out of India’s total 8,186 and 37.43 mt, respectively. The maximum cold stores are concentrated in UP’s potato belt stretching from Mathura-Agra to Farrukhabad-Kannauj. In onion, too, Maharashtra’s growers have built enough “kandha chawls” — naturally-ventilated on-farm structures to prevent moisture ingress and sprouting — that allows them to store the bulbs for 4-6 months and make staggered sales. The creation of storage capacity here is as impressive as the number of sugar mills and organised dairies that today process much of the cane and a significant part of the milk produced by the country’s farmers. But the mere existence of storage/processing capacity hasn’t prevented price volatility in milk or cane payment arrears to farmers.

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While investments in farm-gate, agri-logistics and storage-cum-processing infrastructure need to be encouraged, it must be accompanied by some kind of price or income assurance for farmers. This is more so for horticulture, dairy and poultry producers, who do not enjoy any minimum support price benefits unlike those growing wheat, paddy and sugarcane. The future for Indian agriculture lies in crop diversification, which will spur greater consumption of foods incorporating proteins (pulses, milk, eggs and meat) and micro-nutrients (fruits and vegetables), instead of only calories and carbohydrates. But that cannot happen if producers receive prices that discourage them from growing these crops. Perhaps deficiency price payments or per-hectare direct income transfers could be the way forward.