An 'insult', not a hike: farmers' body SKM calls for village agitation over rabi MSP

NEW DELHI: The Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), the umbrella body that led the 2020-21 farm protests, has rejected the Centre's revised minimum support prices for rabi crops as an 'insult' and called for agitation across villages — a sign that the farm question, never settled, is returning to the streets. The SKM said the corrected C2 cost of production stands at Rs 2,279 per quintal, and demanded the support price be fixed at Rs 3,418 per quintal under its C2+50 per cent formula. It accused the Centre of ignoring the price recommendations of state governments: Maharashtra had sought Rs 4,525 per quintal for wheat last season, Gujarat Rs 4,200, West Bengal Rs 3,450 and Punjab Rs 3,168 — even Haryana's Rs 2,652 was higher than what the Centre fixed. The body questioned the very methodology of cost calculation, saying the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices still works off a 2011-12 index and values farmers' own labour as casual labour. Diesel, a major input for tractors and pump sets, rose by around Rs 7.50 a litre in just ten days in May, while wages alone added about 2.5 per cent to costs — against which the government allowed only 2 per cent for all other costs. Then there is procurement, the unglamorous machinery that decides whether MSP means anything at all. Only around a quarter of the wheat crop was procured during the 2025-26 season, the SKM said. 'An MSP without procurement is a price on paper,' it said — a sentence that condenses the farmer's entire grievance into seven words. The SKM's demands are familiar because they have been pending for years: a legal guarantee for MSP at C2+50 per cent based on an 'honestly calculated' cost of production, immediate revision of the MSPs to its demanded levels, respect for state price recommendations, full freedom for states to pay bonuses, a roll-back of diesel price hikes, and government procurement of every crop in every state. Recalling the government's written assurance to the SKM on MSP on December 9, 2021, the organisation said that nearly five years later, the Centre's response amounted to '25 paise a kilo'. It called upon its constituent organisations and rural youth to read out the new MSP order in villages, burn copies of it, and join protests at district headquarters — an agitation, it said, that would continue until a legal guarantee for MSP at C2+50 per cent is secured. The SKM knows this choreography: farmers' organisations earlier burnt copies of the three farm laws in villages, and the laws were subsequently repealed. The question now is whether a government that buried the 2021 assurance in arithmetic will notice the smoke rising from the villages this time.