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Sugarcane farmers’ agitation turns violent in Maharashtra

Dozens of state-owned buses and other vehicles have been damaged in southern Maharashtra over the past two days by angry sugarcane farmers who are demanding higher remuneration for their produce.

Normal life has been crippled in cities such as Satara, Karad, Sangli and Kolhapur, as hundreds of farmers imposed a two-day general strike. A few state transport buses were also set aflame on the Mumbai-Bangalore national highway, one of the busiest in India. A mob overturned a milk tanker, while others have damaged several such vehicles.

The Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC), which operates ST bus services across the state, cancelled hundreds of buses heading south from Mumbai and Pune, following the farmers’ agitation. The protests are being led by the Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, which is headed by Raju Shetty, a fiery farmers’ leader and Lok Sabha MP from Kolhapur. Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan, who has been negotiating with Shetty, also met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh earlier this week.

Sugarcane farmers across India, especially in the key cane-growing states of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh, are up in arms against sugar factories and the central and state governments, demanding higher remuneration for their crop.

In Maharashtra, the farmers are demanding an initial advance of Rs3,000 a tonne from the sugar factories, which are mainly controlled by politicians from the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (both of which are running the coalition government in Maharashtra) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

But the sugar factories refuse to pay more than Rs2,500 a tonne for cane. They claim that sugar prices have declined sharply over the past 12 months. While sugar was being sold for Rs3,300 a tonne last year, it is now available for Rs2,600.

Vijaysinh Mohite-Patil, a senior state politician (and former deputy chief minister of Maharashtra), who is the chairman of the Maharashtra State Sugar Cooperative Factories Federation, claims that cane farmers should wait for the report of a committee, headed by union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, which Singh had appointed recently.

This year’s excellent south-west monsoon is expected to result in another bumper sugarcane harvest in Maharashtra. In fact, farmers here had boosted their efforts to raise cane, and the total area under cultivation shot up to a record million hectares in the state this season.

In contrast, the state is also facing a glut of sugar, with a surplus carryover stock of nearly 2.5 million tonnes.