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If you are a farmer, that last notification on your phone could be an alert from the Jai Kisan Andolan. And no, it does not have to do with another Maharashtra-style agitation against the government. It is the JKA informing you of the latest price of your commodity in the country’s premier agricultural markets.
MSPAlert, which facilitates this service, is a price tracker with a difference. Launched on April 3, the initiative focusses on one agri commodity a day, compiles its modal price across several mandis where its arrivals are high, and compares them with the minimum support price (MSP) set by government agency CACP (Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices).
“The idea is to inform the public whether farmers are being given the prices promised to them. The NDA government’s latest Budget assured farmers of at least MSP for their produce. With this service, people can decide for themselves whether the government is walking the talk or not,” said Avik Saha, National Convenor of the JKA.
Saha says MSPAlert only uses data available in the public domain, as published on Agmarknet. “We have been to many agri markets where prices are much lower, but we do not want to include those in the alert service as there is no way for us to authenticate them,” he said.
Saha cites the case of barley crop in Rajasthan’s Sri Ganganagar mandi, where the crop is bought at ₹700 a quintal, against the the MSP of ₹1,410. “We know it because our activists are on MSP Satyagraha at Sri Ganganagar. For the MSPAlert, however, we used price information available from six other markets in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, where it ranged from ₹1,100 to ₹1,242 per quintal.”
Since the launch of the service, JKA has covered gram, lentil and barley, among other crops.
“This will continue throughout the current rabi marketing season and beyond,” Saha said. In all these crops, modal prices were at least 12-32 per cent lower than the floor price announced.
He hoped that the alert service, made available to media, researchers, policy makers and others though social media, would help JKA put pressure on the government.
JKA also plans to track farmers’ suicides across the country. “We will collate news items relating to farmers’ suicides so that the public gets an idea about the ever-deepening agrarian crisis.”
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