Politics of sugarcane

Emergence of caste politics has dealt a deadly blow to the important issue of woes of sugarcane farmers in UP, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: May 3, 2007, 19:55:31 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, Dewaria

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Emergence of caste politics has dealt a deadly blow to sugarcane. In its place, Bijli Sadak Pani (BSP) sparks the electoral battle even though the Congress made a desperate attempt to rake up dead issues like pending dues of the sugarcane farmers.

For the Congress, it started with the Union Cabinet deciding to give subsidy to sugarcane industry for revival and paying the dues to farmers last month. In Dewaria, where the Congress won only one of the seven assembly segments in last elections, Youth Congress president Ashok Tanwar announced that the party will revive sugarcane farming. “Our backwardness would be tackled only if the farmers grow sugarcane and gets right price,” explained JP Jaiswal, Congress candidate from Dewaria.

The Congress bid may be a little too late. No more, sugarcane is the first priority of lakhs of farmers in the belt from Dewaria to Mirzapur.

“What is the use?” asks Bhim Yadav of Bhagupur village. Farmers in his village have not received payment of their produce sold to factories from the last 10-12 years, forcing seven major sugar factories to close in the area.

Another reason to dump the crop is that the market price is not very lucrative for farmers. “The middlemen and the factory owner is making the money,” rues Takeshwar Singh, another villager. Large-scale cultivation is now done by a few ‘rich’ farmers in Patrona and Chandpur blocks who can sell their crop well, Singh informed.

But, for political parties like Samajwadi Party and BSP, plight of sugarcane farmers is not a major political issue anymore. “Development is the biggest issue not sugarcane,” said Rajan Singh of SP.

Ram Babu Tiwari, a school teacher in Dewaria, blames the UP caste politics for demise of a rich cash crop. “In a feudal system, the upper castes always oppressed the lower castes. Then in mid-1990s the Yadav got SP and dalit got BSP as political patrons and there was a clear division in votes, resulting in caste issue becoming prominent in elections, rather than people issues,” he said.

This shift has not helped the farmers in anyway. Raman Rai, who has hundred of acres in Chandpur, says sugarcane is twice as profitable to any other crop, if the government assures correct market price and instant payment is made. With less land under sugarcane cultivation, the rise in sugarcane prices is quite obvious.

Like sugarcane farmers, a small group of farmers in Salempur rose that flower growers are fast facing extinction. These roses are raw material used for producing gulab jal (rose water) and iter (scent) sold in domestic markets in UP and Bihar. “Now only a few families are left in the business due to impact of globalization,” said Manjay Rai, a local seller of these products.

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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