India's government has set up a committee chaired by Prof. Ramesh Chand, a former member of NITI Aayog, to examine issues raised by sugarcane farmers and recommend how to address them, the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare announced on Wednesday, Rural Voice reported. The panel was formed after sugarcane farmers' representatives from Karnataka and Maharashtra met the Union ministers for agriculture and for consumer affairs, food and public distribution.
The committee will look at demands for higher remunerative returns to cane growers, taking cultivation costs and other factors into account. It will also review the demand to revise the ex-mill minimum selling price (MSP) of sugar, weighing production costs, market realisations and the financial viability of sugar mills.
Several of its tasks go to how farmers are paid at the mill gate. It will examine how sugar recovery, the key measure of how much sugar a tonne of cane yields, is tested and reported, and how recovery rates can be verified transparently. It will review weighment practices at mills, including calibration, inspection and verification. And it will examine the deduction made from the recorded weight of mechanically harvested cane, assess how much is actually lost in machine harvesting, and evaluate what the practice costs farmers in cane prices.
The panel will consult farmers' representatives, sugar mill associations, state governments and experts, and report its findings and recommendations as early as possible. Its members are the Agriculture Commissioner, the Joint Secretary (Sugar) in the Department of Food and Public Distribution and the Joint Secretary (Legal Metrology) in the Department of Consumer Affairs.
Chand is an agricultural economist who served on NITI Aayog from 2015 to 2026 and earlier led the ICAR-National Institute of Agricultural Economics and Policy Research and sat on the Fifteenth Finance Commission. His recommendations are expected to inform the government's handling of cane growers' grievances and the finances of the sugar industry.
Photo: Honza Soukup / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Source: Rural Voice
Comments
(0)