“I am confident that my dream will come true. My dream is your dream. My dream is with your dream. What is my dream? My dream is that by 2022 when the country celebrates its 75th independence day, the income of farmers should double” prime minister, Narendra Modi said this while addressing a public meeting in Bareilly on February 26th, 2016. And it has been 193 days since the 75th independence day, and a piece of news came out from Maharashtra, where a farmer gets a 2 Rupees cheque for 512 Kg of onions.
On February 24th, 2023, a Twitter user Ravindra Kumar Adi shared a picture of the receipt on Twitter. He wrote in a tweet that there are 500 Kg of onions but in the picture of the receipt it can be seen that the weight of the onions is 512 Kg.
But that’s not the issue, the issue is that after deducting the price of weighing, carriage and wages, he just got 2 Rupees and 49 Paise of profit in hand. Which too gets rounded off and he just got a cheque for 2 Rupees. The cheque is also post-dated which can be cashed on March 8, 2023.
This actually happened on February 17, 2023, when Rajendra Tukaram Chavan goes to a trader to sell his onions. He is from Barshi village, Solapur, Maharashtra and he travels almost 17 km to sell his crop. And what he gets? A cheque of 2 Rupees, that too post-dated for 20 days.
What happened to the promises made for the doubling of farmers’ income? Were they used to getting just 1 Rupee for the same? Only in that condition the promise of double income can look fulfilled.
The condition of farmers getting worse day by day, and the government’s work isn’t looking so promising about that. There have been many promises for farmers but nothing can be seen happening on the ground level. A farmer getting a 20-day post-dated cheque of 2 Rupees is the ground-level reality.
Rajendra Kumar Chavan is just one example of how farmers get exploited by traders in this country. The green revolution is the only thing after the independence of India, which benefitted farmers. Giving 5 Kg of the free ration can ensure no one sleep empty stomach, but the food is not the only thing that a human need.
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