For the third time in three months, farmers protest in Delhi

New Delhi: More than two lakh farmers will be in Delhi on November 29th and 30th. Some of them will begin to enter Delhi from different parts of the country on the night of November 28th. They will spend the night in the camps in different parts of the city.

Others will join them on the morning of November 29 and head to Ramlila Maidan. In the evening, a cultural program will be organized for farmers. The next day, November 30, all farmers will be heading from various meeting points in the city to Parliament Street.

Farmers will demonstrate under the umbrella of the Coordinating Committee for All India, Kisan Sangharsh (AIKSCC), which is a coalition group of more than 200 farmer organizations from all over the world. country.

In addition to the increase in minimum support prices and a single unconditional loan waiver, farmers this time also call for a special session of Parliament dedicated to the debate on agrarian distress.

The coalition also calls on Parliament to pbad two bills prepared by the AIKSCC – a deleveraging bill and a bill guaranteeing a remunerative PSM.

India attended several demonstrations of farmers who won the national law. importance. The long march of Kisan from Nasik to Mumbai in March this year, the gathering of all India Kisan Sabha in Delhi in September and the Union Bhartiya Kisan in October, to name a few.

Rural distress has been a source of concern for decades, but the scale of events we have seen this year is rare. Small farms, low prices and crop losses due to bad weather led farmers to cyclically incur debt.

Between 1995 and 2016, 3,333,398 farmers committed suicide. That's more than 15,000 suicides each year, 1,200 suicides a month, or 42 suicides a day. Still, the issue has failed to galvanize activists, academics and politicians from all over the spectrum.

The issue has become a rallying point for social activists, academics and politicians to come together and express their support for a common cause on a common platform, so much so that the rivals of West Bengal – the Trinamool Congress and the CPM – even evoked the possibility of collaborative efforts with rural distress acting as a glue.

The tipping point may have arrived in Mandsaur in June 2017, when police opened fire on farmers protesting against falling prices. Six farmers were slaughtered.

It is after Mandsaur that the AIKSCC was created. It started with a coalition of a handful of farmer organizations and now includes 208 organizations from across the country. The main members of the AIKSCC are All India Kisan Sabha, Affiliate Member of the CPM, Swaraj Abhiyan, V.M. led by Yogendra Yadav, V.M. Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan of Singh and the National Alliance of Peoples Movements led by Medha Patkar.

Key Claims Remain the Same

Since Mandsaur, farmer demonstrations are commonplace in almost all Indian states. The implementation of the 2006 Swaminathan Commission Report and unconditional waiver of a single loan were among the key demands.

The main recommendation of the Swaminathan commission report was that the MSP be set at 1.5 times the cost. For example, if the production cost of a given crop is 1000 Rs per hundredweight, the MSP should be 1500 Rs per quintal.

In July of this year, the government headed by Narendra Modi announced that it had responded to farmers' demand and that it was multiplied by 1.5. However, as The Wire reported to at the time this claim was misleading.

The Swaminathan commission recommended that the MSP be set at 1.5 times the C2 (overall cost). But the government decided to set the MSP at 1.5 times A2FL, which is significantly lower than C2. The MSP for most crops already exceeded A2FL 1.5 times when the government made this announcement.

Since then, another MSP application has been confirmed: a constitutional guarantee that crops will not be sold below MSP.

As The Wire a reported the market price for most crops was lower than that announced by the government. In fact, in October, the market price for 10 of the 14 kharif crops was below the MSP announced by the government, according to data obtained from the government portal Agmarknet. For three crops, the price was lower not only at this year's average cost, but also at the average cost last year.

The other essential demand of farmers is a single and unconditional loan exemption. They argue that this is essentially equivalent to the payment of arrears. The arrears of the price they would have achieved if the Swaminathan commission report had been implemented in 2006 (if MSP had been set at 1.5 times C2).

The walk to Delhi, "Dilli Challo," builds on the success of farmers' long march to Mumbai in March, when more than 30,000 farmers walked from Nasik to Mumbai to badert their claims. The march was organized by the All India Kisan Sabha CPM

. The farmers will march on November 29 and 30 in different parts of Delhi and will finally gather in Parliament Street on November 30, where they will protest. [19659002] Another demonstration takes place in Singur, West Bengal. Organized by AIKS, farmers are protesting the state's inaction in restoring land to their farmers. The farmers had to recover 997 acres acquired in 2007, but only 11 acres were returned, according to AIKS.

The march of more than 50,000 farmers began in Singur on Wednesday and will culminate at Raj Bhavan in Kolkata on Thursday. The protest, according to AIKS, is part of the protest in Delhi.