Ahead of the assembly polls, the Uttar Pradesh government on Wednesday initiated the process for the enhancement of cane rate in the state with the State Advisory Committee on cane prices holding a high-level meeting with all the stakeholders, including farmers and sugar mill associations, two officials who participated in the meeting said.
The development comes in the wake chief minister Yogi Adityanath making an announcement during an interaction with a group of progressive farmers here last week that the government would soon increase the State-Advised Price (SAP) of cane.
The SAP of cane was last upped by ₹10 per quintal in 2017 soon after the present government came to power. The current SAP is ₹325 per quintal—the price that has not been revised since 2017 because of which the Opposition has been targeting the government within and outside the assembly.
In the meeting chaired by chief secretary Rajendra Kumar Tiwari, farmers’ representatives, according to officials, demanded the government fixed the SAP at ₹400 per quintal in view of the fact that the SAP had not been revised for last four consecutive years and also because their input costs in terms of diesel price etc had gone up considerably since.
People representing sugar mills, however, expressed strong reservations over the demand on the plea that it would not be possible for sugar mills to be viable at the rate demanded by the farmers. “The sugar mill associations did agree to farmers that cane price revision was overdue considering the growing input cost but at the same time they said ₹400 per quintal price as demanded by farmers would be too high for mills to pay,” officials said.
{{/usCountry}}People representing sugar mills, however, expressed strong reservations over the demand on the plea that it would not be possible for sugar mills to be viable at the rate demanded by the farmers. “The sugar mill associations did agree to farmers that cane price revision was overdue considering the growing input cost but at the same time they said ₹400 per quintal price as demanded by farmers would be too high for mills to pay,” officials said.
{{/usCountry}}The sugar mills association pleaded that the current minimum selling price (MSP) of sugar, as fixed by the Centre, was already too low for sugar mills to earn profits amid slump in the sugar industry and any irrational hike in the SAP of cane would further hit sugar trade hard in UP, officials said.
The chief secretary, according to officials, asked cane commissioner Sanjay Bhoosreddy who is also additional chief secretary, sugar, to prepare a proposal for the SAP revision taking into consideration all stakeholders’ views and suggestions. The proposal recommending the SAP hike may soon be put to the Cabinet for approval
The next cane crushing season is scheduled to start from October 20 in western UP, from October 25 in Central UP and from the first week of November in the eastern region.
Though the government has often claimed of having made a record payment of ₹1.42 lakh crore to farmers as arrears pending since 2010, non-revision of the SAP since 2017 was snowballing into a political issue before assembly polls in the state. Many farmers in western UP have also been staging protests against the Centre’s three farm laws for last several months and have threatened to intensify the stir incorporating other issues too, including non-revision of the SAP.