Govt forms MSP committee with former Agriculture Secretary as Chairman; SKM less likely to join

Moving a step ahead on the issue of forming a committee on Minimum Support Price (MSP), one of the points of the agreement between the government and the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) to end the farmers’ movement against the three controversial farm laws brought by the government in June 2020, the government has made a committee to make MSP more effective. Former Agriculture Secretary Sanjay Agrawal will be the Chairman of the committee. There will be three representatives from SKM, though their names have not been decided yet. Meanwhile, SKM members have indicated that they will not join the committee. When the movement against the controversial farm laws had lasted for more than a year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a repeal of the three laws last November. And it was then that he had spoken of forming a committee on MSP. Thus, the government has formed this committee about eight months after the announcement.

The government published in the Gazette issued on Monday the notification brought by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare on 12 July 2022 with regard to the formation of the committee. According to it, the committee will have Member (Agriculture) of NITI Aayog Ramesh Chand, Agricultural Economist Dr CSC Shekhar from the Indian Institute of Economic Development, Dr Sukhpal Singh from IIM Ahmedabad and Senior Member of the CACP Naveen P Singh.

National award-winning farmer Bharat Bhushan Tyagi has also been included as a farmer representative. According to the notification, there will be three members from the SKM whose names are “to be added on receipt” (from SKM). Gunwant Patil, Krishnaveer Choudhary, Pramod Kumar Choudhary, Guni Prakash and Sayyed Pasha Patel have been kept as members from other farmer organizations. Besides, Dilip Sanghani, Chairman, IFFCO, and Binod Anand, General Secretary, CNRI, will also be part of the committee. Senior members of agricultural universities/institutions, five secretary-level representatives of the Government of India and the chief secretaries of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim and Odisha have also been included in the committee.

According to the notification, the committee will consider measures to make the current MSP system more effective and transparent. It will also make suggestions on practicality to give more autonomy to the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), which recommends the MSP for crops every year.

As per the notification, the committee will deliberate measures to strengthen the agriculture marketing system. Its objective is to ensure higher value to the farmers through remunerative prices of their produce by taking advantage of the domestic and export opportunities.

The committee will also offer its suggestions regarding promoting natural farming, crop diversification and micro irrigation scheme. It will also suggest strategies to make Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) and other R&D institutions as knowledge centres.

Speaking about this step of the government, Yudhvir Singh, a member of the SKM core committee and general secretary of Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), said to Rural Voice, “This committee does not match the one that SKM had asked to form. The officials who had either supported the three farm laws or played a role in implementing them are part of the committee. Besides, our demand is that the government give a legal guarantee for MSP first and then form a committee to suggest measures necessary to implement it. But the government has made no mention of a legal guarantee for MSP; rather, it speaks of making the current MSP system effective. Besides, it has broad-based the agenda by adding to it issues like natural farming, crop diversification and making the CACP more effective. Therefore, it does not make sense for SKM and BKU representatives to be part of a committee that is dominated by people who are opposed to our issues.” Yogendra Yadav, another member from SKM and also a Swaraj Abhiyan member, issued a statement calling the committee a fraud on the farmers.

However, it had been decided even before March that the committee formed by the government would have a wider scope. At that time, it had been shelved due to the State Assembly elections. It was in March that Rural Voice had published a report informing about the possible nature of the committee. Going by the attitude of the farmer organizations towards the formation of the committee, it seems that the bigger farmer organizations may distance themselves from the committee just as they had done in the case of the committee constituted by the Supreme Court to find a solution to the farmers’ movement.