 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are joined by Professor Vikas Ravan of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning from Jawaharlal University and he is one of the co-authors of a recent report which has looked into the situation of agricultural markets or Mondays in India. Now we have seen a lot of reports, media reports, anecdotal reports of the situation but this is the first study which systematically looks at the situation across the country. Thank you so much Professor for joining us. So could you first give us an outline of what the key conclusions are especially regarding what is the inflow of produce, where has there been a shortage and what are the crops that are actually not coming and why does it continue? So Prashant, when the lockdown was announced on March 25th, essentially you had a sudden problem that you see this is the time when ruby crops are harvested, ruby crops were either being harvested, some had already been harvested or some were about to be harvested in different places. There are some differences in the precise time when this happens but this is broadly the time when ruby harvest has to happen. Now it seems government had really not thought about what is going to happen to ruby harvest when you impose a lockdown. So as soon as that happened, there is a huge problem that farmers are not being able to sell the crop. And then the government sort of started scrambling for finding ways to get that started. On the 27th, the first notification came which exempted the markets from the restrictions of the lockdown. Now what we have done is we have looked at the data for the Mondays for the 21-day period of that first phase of the lockdown to see what happened to the market arrivals as it is called, the arrivals of agricultural produce in the markets during that 21-day period. Now there is a database of the Ministry of Agriculture called Eggmark Net which provides daily data for a very large number of Mondays. So what we did was we downloaded that data set for each day for all the Mondays that we could get hold of and looked at the Mondays that had some arrival of these crops in the month of March and compared the 21-day lockdown period with the same period in the previous years. That is essentially what we have done. We are talking of something like 1331 Mondays across the country which we managed to look at to see what exactly happened. Now what you basically find is that despite this sort of delayed sort of realization that government needed to do something to get the Mondays functioning to ensure that the food supply chains keep functioning, pretty little was actually done. All that they did was pass some orders to say this is exempted, that is exempted. But what we really find is that not very much in terms of effectiveness in ensuring functioning of markets takes place. So just to give you an example, in comparison with last year, during this 21-day period if you look at wheat, 688 Mondays out of 1331 that we had data on, there are others for which data were not available. But if you take what the Mondays for which we had the data, 688 had arrivals of wheat during this period, last year. This year in comparison, only 264 Mondays had arrivals of wheat during this period. Now this is broadly what you see across all the seven crops that we've looked at. We've looked at wheat, we've looked at chana which is the most important pulse crop of this season. We've looked at mustard which is the most important oil seed crop of the year of this season. We've looked at potato, onion, tomatoes and we have looked at cauliflower. So you have a representation of all kinds of crop produce that come to the market at this time of the day, at this time of the year. Now you basically find that across the board, for all the crops, there was a huge shortfall both in terms of Mondays where any arrivals were taken. So a lot of Mondays are simply closed. Now why were Mondays closed despite the fact that a government had exempted them? Well, one most important reason of course was that once the Janata curfew was announced and then the lockdown was announced, a lot of migrant workers, as we have seen, had to just go back home and they walked back in desperate situations and they just left the towns and went back to their villages from where they'd come. Now a lot of that migrant labor actually works in the Mondays at this time. In fact, a lot of migration happens because of this harvesting season. There is harvesting labor required in the villages, there is labor required in the Mondays for loading, unloading, sorting, winnowing, packaging, all of that work requires a lot of labor. It's all manual. So a lot of migrant labor is involved in this and since that migrant labor had left and the local labor was essentially confined to their villages, you basically did not, you had a serious shortage of labor. And then there were other constraints. I mean, the traders were not sure if they should function. There's this whole sort of fear of working. So you basically find that although the government did the exemption, they did not do very much more than that to ensure that the Mondays actually function. Now, the even more damning thing comes when you look at the day-town actual arrivals, the quantity of arrivals that you see in this one day period. Now, if you look at that 21-day period, this year in during the period of lockdown, the total quantity of wheat that arrived in the Mondays was just 6% of the total arrivals of wheat that happened in the same 21-day period last year. It's the same thing for chickpea. It's the same thing for mustard. For potato, you basically had 41% arrivals. For onion, you had 30% arrival. For tomato, you had 74% arrivals and so on. So basically a huge shortfall in the arrivals as compared to last year. You see in the period of this year's lockdown. Now, if you notice, so what we've done is we've looked at day-by-day arrivals. So you take each day's arrival and compare with the same day of the week last year. And you basically find that two things. One is that arrivals this year before the lockdown were higher than arrivals last year. So we were doing better than last year before the lockdown. And then there is a crash with the lockdown. You know, the lockdown just sort of everything comes tumbling down. There's a crash. And then, you know, in fact, what is striking is that you don't find much of a recovery through the period of 21 days of lockdown. So that gap continues. The gap between last year and this year continues to rise through the period of 21 days. So not only you had made no plans, you had made no preparation, you had not anticipated anything. You actually did not take any effective measure to take care of the problem. So basically, you end up with a huge disaster where the crops are unsold, farmers are unable to sell their crops. They are obviously incurring losses because of it. The crops get damaged, particularly perishable crops like tomato. If for 20 days you are not able to sell your crop, the crop is destroyed. So massive losses have been borne by farmers because of their inability to sell the crops. This is the time when you sell the crop, you get some money and that is the money that lasts you for the next six months. That's the money that lasts you for your consumption, that you need for your consumption requirements right now. And the money that you need for investing in the next crop. So you see the implications of this are going to be really long drawn out because farmers have incurred massive losses because of inability to sell the crop. So that's essentially what you find. In fact, what you also then see is that while there is this sort of drop in the quantity of arrivals, so the supply has fallen, that shortage of supply doesn't seem to have a sort of similar significant effect on the prices. Prices become much more volatile after the lockdown. So the period of lockdown is a period in which wholesale prices, the Monday prices were fluctuating much more widely than they were before. You know, it's not as if farmers gain because of higher profit, higher prices. They lost because of low supply, they did not have any other gain. So you basically have a situation where this disruption of agricultural Monday for a fairly prolonged period has really compounded the distress of farmers. That's essentially what I thought is about it. And like you pointed out, this is also something that has happened across the country. So are there any regional patterns that you were able to notice? So certain regions may be getting a bit more affected. Well, I think all the regions are affected very badly. There are some regional patterns that we have looked at, for example, the states. Now one thing is that across the states, I mean, this is really something that no state was able to deal with this. Baring, I think there's one case where Karnataka for tomato has had some success. But a crop like cauliflower, the Monday sales were a little better. But cauliflower is a very minor crop in terms of quantities. It's just time as compared to even potato or onion or tomato. So I mean, that's the only kind of marketing that happened. But for major crops, you basically don't see any state which has done anything like what could be called reasonably well. But what you do find well, one is that we don't have data for all the states. So Maharashtra for some reason, unknown to us, had not been reporting data for about a month prior to the lockdown. So we don't know what's gone wrong, why Maharashtra was not reporting for whatever reason. Then Punjab and Haryana, the harvesting is late. But mind you, Punjab and Haryana had a late harvest even last year. So even last year, Mondays during that 21 day period did not report any arrivals. They have not reported any arrivals this year either. So Punjab and Haryana by and large for major crop, which is the major crop in Punjab and Haryana did not have any arrivals last year, did not have any arrivals this year. Now that's very important. Initially it was argued that arrivals are slow because of longer winter. The winter is sort of delayed, so arrivals are late in coming. It's not true. Arrivals were delayed in Punjab and Haryana, that is true. But arrivals were delayed in Pajama and Haryana last year as well. So this drop that you see is not because of delayed winter. The drop is simply because your Mondays are not functional. The farmers were unable to bring produce to the Mondays. You see, bringing produce to the Monday requires mobilization of a substantial amount of labor in the village. Harvesting, threshing, winnowing, loading, putting it in the granary, then loading it into the bullock carts or tractor trolleys, all of that requires labor. And then when you bring it to the Monday, Monday requires a lot of labor. Now, given the fact that there is this massive shortage of labor, people in the villages are not allowed to assemble together to do anything which requires a lot of people to gather. Threshing, for example, is a task where, because this is summer in North India, it's typically done at night. A large number of workers just get together and do, you know, 15 people who get together and do all the threshing of a farmer in one night. Now, if people are not able to get together because of restrictions, the task doesn't get done. And if you have to start doing it manually or just using family labor, then it just gets prolonged. So because of this whole disruption in labor process, you have a situation where the entire thing is not functioning. So as far as the government is concerned, this includes both the central and the state governments, what is there anything that can be done at this point of time to sort of improve the situation? Well, I think two things. I think first, we have to call out the fact that being unprepared is a crime. The fact that you are in this situation is because when you knew for three months that something like this was coming, you made zero preparation for this. You had no idea. You did not think that Rabihavish was a month ago. Why in the month of February or in the month of January did you not start planning for this? You know, the fact that this movement was imposed with zero planning, with utter unpreparedness is the crime that has to be called out and somebody has to be held accountable for this. That's the first thing. You know, that's the biggest crime that has happened. This entire thing was well known that it was coming. The whole world was dealing with it. And you just didn't think what was going to happen when something like this comes to India. What are the different challenges that we're going to deal with? Why didn't the Ministry of Agriculture think of all of this one month prior to the lockdown? So that's the first thing. What can be done now? Well, one is government needs to first give out money to the farmers. Farmers are incurring losses. Farmers are unable to sell their crops. You have given them zero assistance. You've just given them one installment of PM Kisan. That also has not reached everybody, which in any case was due to them. You've not given even a next advance installment. You've not given them any additional assistance to deal with their losses. You have to compensate farmers for the losses they have incurred. You do it either directly through state compensation or do it through your insurance scheme. But it is something that has to cover practically every farmer. An assessment has to be made of losses incurred by farmers and farmers have to be compensated for that, that there is no doubt about that. There are other things that need to be done immediately. You need to basically do a loan waiver. You need to say farmers loans are waived. You need to give them debt relief. You need to give them debt relief. You need to increase the MSP. You need to increase the procurement. You see, there is a problem because you are staggering the procurement now because of this need to do social distancing. The procurement is going to take much longer, which means that farmers are going to have to incur further costs in maintaining their crops. They are not going to get their money for a much longer time. They will not be able to pay their loans. They will not be able to buy inputs for the next season. You have to deal with this. Farmers have to be provided resources to continue. And if you don't do it, you are going to do it at your own peril. Farmers feed this country. If they are not going to be compensated, you cause serious damage to Rabi Arvez. Now, you are going to cause a serious damage to Karif's crop in the coming season if you don't compensate them now. So there is an urgent need to have a provision for debt relief for farmers, for compensating them for their losses and to ensure that procurement happens quickly and procurement is expanded. You see, farmers, if you are not able to come to the Mandi, you will have to do distresses to traders in the village who will sell you the produce at much lower price. So government needs to intervene, ensure that farmers are able to sell their crop at MSP and that would require a huge operation of decentralized procurement at the village level. Government needs to, state agencies need to go to the village and say, we are going to pick up your produce from here. We will lift your produce from the village. You don't have to come to the Mandi. We will lift at MSP from you in the village. Now, that needs the state to invest in this entire process. Exactly. Clearly, the state is even thinking of it. Thank you so much, Professor. I will be talking to us. Thank you, Prashant. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching.