Twenty-five paise a kilo: the arithmetic of contempt

Of all the phrases the Samyukta Kisan Morcha has aimed at the Centre this week, one deserves to be carved above the door of every agricultural ministry in the country: 'nearly five years after the written assurance, the response was 25 paise a kilo.' Consider what that sentence contains. In December 2021, after a year of protest that humbled a government, farmers were given a written assurance on MSP. Five years later, the rabi revision arrives — and the SKM's accountants do the subtraction. Maharashtra asked Rs 4,525 a quintal for wheat; the Centre fixed less than even Haryana's Rs 2,652. The corrected C2 cost is Rs 2,279; the demand is Rs 3,418. The gap between the promise and the price is not a rounding error. It is a policy. The insult is in the methodology. The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices still calculates with a 2011-12 index — a cost sheet from a different economic era — and values the farmer's own labour as casual labour, as if the person who owns the risk of the monsoon were a day-wage hand on someone else's field. Diesel rose Rs 7.50 a litre in ten days in May; the government allowed 2 per cent for 'all other costs'. This is not economics. It is a story the state tells itself about how little the producer is worth. And then the cruellest line of all: 'An MSP without procurement is a price on paper.' Only a quarter of the wheat crop was procured in 2025-26. A support price nobody will pay is not a price; it is a press release. The farmer understands this perfectly well, which is why the SKM is not asking for a bigger number this time — it is asking for a legal guarantee, for procurement of every crop in every state, for the freedom of states to pay bonuses. It is asking, in other words, for the number to be real. Periyar taught us to ask the oldest question in political economy: who produces, who prices, who profits? The farmer produces the grain. The Commission prices it with a fifteen-year-old index. And the profit accrues to everyone in the chain except the first link. When the SKM calls for the MSP order to be read out and burnt in villages, it is performing the only audit the state cannot fudge — the audit of dignity. Burning paper is a language governments understand. The three farm laws were burnt in villages before they were repealed in Parliament. If this government mistakes that history for a one-time event, the villages will happily give it a refresher course — starting at the district headquarters, as the SKM has announced. Twenty-five paise a kilo. That is what a written assurance is worth when the arithmetic is designed by the people who never have to live by it.