Sweet & Sour

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Saharanpur/Muzaffarnagar: Western Uttar Pradesh is burning. The sugarcane rich belt, which is the backbone of India’s economy, has reaped a bitter harvest this year. At a time when prices of the finished commodity are touching never-before-heights the world over, especially in the backdrop of a severe cane crisis, growers were hoping of garnering better returns on their investments. But with both the central and the state governments caught in a slanging match over the ownership right of fixing cane prices on behalf of the farmers with their respective fair and remunerative price (FRP) and state advisory price (SAP) regimes, thanks to the politically sensitive nature of the cash crop, the actual growers are finding themselves to be outsiders in the issue.

Forced into a situation where they have to accept whatever pittance the political masters fix for them, the farmers have no other way to express their anger, anguish and betrayal but to set fire to the very crop which they have tended to through heavy odds of drought and floods for the last 10 months.

For some, the situation is so helpless that they have taken the extreme step of setting fire to themselves along with their fields. “This year has been especially bad. Drought was followed by floods. Our irrigation costs have gone up substantially and we have tilled our lands by taking loans. After all this, if we are not able to recover our input costs, then what good is this crop to us? We might as well burn it. It is the only form of protest that a farmer can take to,” says Lakhan Singh, a small farmer who has a standing cane crop on his 3 acres plot in Seedki village on the Saharanpur-Muzaffarnagar road.

The situation has turned so volatile that for the first time in many years, circumstances are such that hitherto warring farmer leaders, for whom control over the maximum number of farmers has always been a prestige issue, have all set aside their personal difference and party affiliations and joined ranks to shore up the common grievance of the farmer.