Govt to fix MSP for 14 forest goods from Jan 1

The government will fix a market-linked minimum support price (MSP) for 14 items - including bamboo, tendu leaf, honey and tamarind - on the list of minor forest produce from January 1, 2013. Chetan Chauhan reports. Gathering for a living

Updated on: Oct 8, 2012, 01:13:11 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government will fix a market-linked minimum support price (MSP) for 14 items - including bamboo, tendu leaf, honey and tamarind - on the list of minor forest produce from January 1, 2013. This is being done to "substantially" increase the income of around 10 crore tribals and forest dwellers.

The MSP implementation comes exactly five years after the watershed Forest Rights Act became effective, and more than a year before the next general elections in 2014. Political strategists in the government believe that fixing the MSP for forest produce can benefit the UPA - a la MGNREGA in the 2009 elections.

The forest rights law, enforced by the UPA-1, gave forest dwellers and tribals the right to harvest minor forest produce for their livelihood, a business considered to be worth Rs. 5,000 crore annually. However, they still get less than one-tenth of the market price for the produce collected.

"The new MSP will substantially increase the income of tribals without having a ripple effect on the market price of the produce," tribal affairs minister Kishore Chandra Deo said.

With this, tribals and forest dwellers - who are currently forced to sell items such as tamarind for Rs. 8 per kg, as compared to the market price of Rs. 100-120 per kg - will get a higher selling price.

The new mechanism, approved by the Planning Commission, will have state government agencies buying the produce directly from tribals at the MSP and then selling it to end-produce manufacturers. The tribals, however, will have the choice of selling the produce to private agencies - provided they pay more than the MSP.

A Central Price Fixation Commission will be set up by the tribal affairs ministry to fix the MSP on an annual basis. The Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India will enforce it across the states, Deo said.

While the MSP will initially be declared for 14 minor forest products at the national level, it would then be extended to other derivatives.

In 2010, the panchayati raj ministry had constituted a committee under T Haque to recommend a mechanism for determining the minimum support price for minor forest products. A year later, the panel submitted its recommendation for a central MSP.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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