Food supplies to Maharashtra cities are pinched as farmers’ strike kicks off

Fruit and vegetable supplies in some cities in Maharashtra have been pinched as farmers in several parts of the state went on strike on Thursday to press for a list of demands – prime among which is that agricultural loans should be waived. The protest is expected to last a week.

From June 1, farmers across Maharashtra have agreed not to take their produce to local markets, not to supply milk to dairies, and to prevent trucks on highways from reaching cities for seven days. Some farmers, though not all, have even resolved to delay sowing should the monsoon arrive early.

Hours after the strike began, reports began to stream in of trucks being halted on highways in parts of Satara, Ahmednagar and Nashik.

However, the impact was not really visible at the Agricultural Produce Market Committee’s market in Vashi, in Mumbai.

“Arrivals today have been 100% normal and there has been absolutely no impact of any strike,” said Shivaji Pahinkar, the secretary of the Vashi market. “If farmers really want to strike, they won’t give their produce to trucks at all.” The produce at Vashi is mostly brought in by traders.

In Pune’s Manjiri Agricultural Produce Market Committee, where farmers’ sell their produce directly, arrivals were markedly lower. But Devidas Shevale, the official in charge of all Pune markets, said he would be able to give a concrete estimate of the impact only when the market opened formally at 2.30 pm.

If successful, the strike, which comes just before the kharif cropping season will start with the monsoon, is likely to impact the prices of vegetables, mostly leafy ones which have short cropping cycles, and not staples like wheat, rice or pulses as they have already been harvested.

Strike building up

“We have been protesting for years for the government to address our problems,” said Shankar Darikar, a grape and onion farmer from Nashik who is one of the people organising the social media outreach for the protestors. “Now we have decided to bring our problems to the attention of the government in this way.”

The idea for the strike originated in early April in Puntamba, a village near Shirdi in Ahmednagar district, when farmers decided at two gram sabhas that they would boycott markets from June if the government did not agree to their requests.

The full list of seven requests include agricultural loan waivers, implementing the Swaminathan Commission report on a holistic national farm policy, free drip and sprinkler irrigation, eight hours of electricity free daily, zero-interest loans, pensions for landholding farmers above the age of 60 and for the price of milk to be raised to Rs 50 per litre.

The farmers refused to negotiate with anyone other than Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who finally sent a representative to them on Tuesday morning. A core committee delegation met the chief minister that evening, but the talks proved inconclusive. Fadnavis agreed nominally to a loan waiver but not to a timeline for it.

New protest model

The farmers’ strike is consciously modelled on the runaway success of the silent Maratha rallies demanding reservations and a dilution of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act that rocked the state last year. These rallies, held in every district in Maharashtra, saw lakhs of Marathas taking to the roads in an apparently leaderless movement that was in fact tightly coordinated.

The strikers in this Kisan Kranti similarly claim to be leaderless and non-political, though they have a core committee of around one leader from each district, and other smaller committees including one to handle all social media content. It has also welcomed farmers’ groups such as the Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatna, whose leader, Raju Shetti, has recently been threatening to withdraw support to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government.

“The Maratha rallies failed for two reasons,” said Darikar, the farmer from Nashik. “One was that it did not leave a window open to negotiate the government and the other that it did not have an end date. We have avoided both these problems.”

The group has widespread support, particularly among Marathas but not restricted to that group in central Maharashtra, Marathwada and parts of Vidarbha, but has not managed to penetrate into Konkan or eastern Vidarbha.

Among farmers who do support it, there is a mix of energy and resignation. Farmer poets, for instance, have mushroomed in forwards across Whatsapp groups drumming up enthusiasm for the event.

There are others who have a more pragmatic outlook. Stacks of onions piled up outside homes in villages have become common in the last few weeks, farmers say. The rates are at an average of Rs 300-Rs 350 per quintal. It is these vegetables they do not intend to bring to markets.

“Even without the strike we would have been at a loss if we had gone to the market,” said Hemant Ghorade, a farmer at a market in Nashik’s Yeola taluka, where onions are also sold. “Farmers were at a loss before and will be again in the future. So we can participate in the strike without it making us suffer too much of a worse loss.”