Farmers who sow cotton in mid-June to early-July after the southwest monsoon rains typically harvest the crop over 4-5 pickings by mid-December to early-January, with some continuing to pick till February-end or beyond. 3 Even cotton requires anywhere from 6 to 12 irrigations ( ), given its long duration of 6-8 months compared to 3-4 months for groundnut, soyabean and most pulses. The same goes for paddy/rice grown in Punjab, Haryana, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, which together contributed to about 60% of the grain procured by government agencies in 2020-21. Almost 100% of sugarcane and wheat area in India is under irrigation. 2 Secondly, all four are relatively water-guzzling.
The first is that the four above-mentioned crops have just over 22% combined share of the total value of India’s agricultural output from crops and livestock products. Source: FCI, NAFED, CCI, National Federation of Cooperative Sugar Factories and Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare. Only crops with minimum 1,000 tonnes procurement are taken *Procurement by sugar mills **In lakh bales of 170 kg each. Note: Figures are for agriculture year (July-June). How much of production gets procured at minimum support price MSP coverage in these four crops accounts for nearly three-fourths of the country’s sugarcane production, while amounting to roughly 50% for paddy/rice, 40% for wheat and 25% for cotton. While MSP implementation in the latter three takes place via procurement by government agencies such as the Food Corporation of India (FCI), National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED) and Cotton Corporation of India (CCI), in sugarcane, it is the mills that are, by law, required to pay the Centre’s “fair and remunerative price” to growers (UP, Haryana, Punjab and Uttarakhand fix even higher “state advised prices”). Such effectiveness, as the table below shows, has been mostly confined to four crops: Sugarcane, paddy/rice, wheat and cotton. MSP’s effectiveness has been a function of implementation on the ground, either through direct government procurement or forcing private industry to pay. MSP in India has had the same limitations as irrigation the benefits in both have flowed largely to farmers of a few crops and regions. And this is a demand having universal appeal, beyond the farmers of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh (UP).
What began as a movement for rolling back the three agricultural reform laws enacted by the Narendra Modi government in September 2020 – these were formally repealed by Parliament on November 29 – has since grown into one that itself demands the introduction and passage of a legislation conferring mandatory status to MSP. The above lesson from history is relevant in today’s times, when there is a demand from farmer organizations to make minimum support prices (MSP) a “legal entitlement” for all crops. The canal works, too, wouldn’t pay for themselves if the water in the dams, built and stored at a great cost, had no assured takers even in normal years. Recovering the cost of irrigating their fields was possible only through sale of these crops. The demand for irrigation on a regular (as against emergency) basis even in ordinary (non-drought) years could come only from farmers growing cash crops.
In normal years, no farmer would use canal water that, unlike rainwater, did not come free. The reason for the Deccan canals turning from “protective” to “productive” works, with their waters being used mainly for cultivation of “cash” (in this case, sugarcane) as opposed to “subsistence” crops, was simple: Why would farmers want to pay for irrigation if they were just producing grain for home consumption? Spending money on water for jowar or bajra made sense only in years when the rains had totally failed. What they ended up doing, instead, was convert western Maharashtra into a premier sugarcane-growing belt. The colonial authorities had originally conceived these canals as “protective” irrigation works, enabling farmers in a semi-arid drought-prone region to raise their normal subsistence crops of jowar (sorghum) and bajra (pearl millet). This was followed by the opening of the Girna, Godavari and Pravara canals in Nashik and Ahmednagar during 1910 to 1920.
In 1876 – a year after the so-called Deccan Riots, in which indebted Maratha peasants raided the shops and homes of village moneylenders to burn all mortgage deeds and other records lying with them – the British India government initiated the construction of the Nira Left Bank Canal in Pune district.