The Hindu : Support price for wheat, oilseeds hiked

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 03, 2002

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Support price for wheat, oilseeds hiked

By Gargi Parsai

New Delhi April 2. The Centre today hiked the minimum support price (MSP) of rabi wheat by 1.6 per cent to Rs. 620 a quintal — ignoring the recommendation of the Commission for Agriculture Costs and Prices (CACP) backed by the Ministry of Food to freeze the MSP at last year's level of Rs. 610.

The Government also did not succumb to pressure from the wheat-growing States such as Haryana and Punjab to increase the support price up to 25 per cent.

The long-delayed decision was taken today at a meeting of the Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee.

(Reacting swiftly, the Punjab Chief Minister, Amarinder Singh, "rejected'' what he called the minor increase in the MSP of wheat and appealed to the Centre to reconsider the decision as the "farming community was under an unprecedented debt burden and input costs had gone up considerably''. He said he had met the Food Minister, Shanta Kumar, and demanded a rabi MSP of Rs. 760 a quintal. He said that according to Punjab Agriculture University experts, the cost of production of wheat had risen to Rs. 660 per quintal). The Union Cabinet also hiked the MSP for oilseeds and pulses by Rs. 100 a quintal to encourage crop diversification, the Law Minister, Arun Jaitley told reporters. The MSP for grams had been increased to Rs. 1,200 from Rs. 1,100 a quintal and for rapeseed/mustard, safflower and masoor, Rs. 1,300 a quintal, up from Rs. 1,200. The MSP for barley would continue to be Rs. 500 a quintal.

The support price fixed for the rabi crops is expected to provide incentives to farmers to invest and improve production and productivity.

The substantial hike in the MSP of oilseeds and pulses is intended to wean the farmers away from traditional foodgrains like wheat and rice, which are flooding the godowns.

Mr. Jaitley said that all the recommendations of the CACP had been accepted by the Union Cabinet except the one relating to the MSP for wheat.

Burdened with a huge foodgrain stocks of about 55 million tonnes, the Centre had set up a high-power Committee to look into the question of delinking foodgrains procurement from the MSP.

The committee is yet to submit its report. There is also a proposal to put a cap on procurement as burgeoning stocks limit storage space.

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