Will a hike in MSP help farmers? (GS Paper 3, Economy)
Why in news?
- Recently, the Centre announced the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for 2023 summer (kharif) season crops, hiking prices between 5-10% from last season, “to ensure remunerative prices to growers for their produce and to encourage crop diversification.”
- Experts argue that in the absence of any dependable or assured market mechanism of procurement-purchase for crops on the MSP in most parts of the country, the purpose of encouraging “crop diversification” gets defeated.
How does the MSP work?
- The MSP, which is a part of the government’s agricultural price policy, is the price at which the government offers to procure farmers’ produce during the season.
- It works as a tool to stabilise production and to control consumer prices, yet farmers across the country have been facing problems of selling their produce at the MSP.
- Delays in establishing procurement centres, exploitation at the hands of commission agents, who most of the time buy the produce from farmers below the MSP, and a lack of awareness about the MSP among a large section of farmers, are some of the challenges growers have been facing for years now.
- Against this background, farmers have been demanding a ‘legal status’ to the MSP. The government, including the Centre and States, ought to come up with a system to set up an ‘assured market mechanism,’ point out farmers. The MSP has little meaning unless farmers’ produce is procured/purchased at the assured price.
What is the government’s announcement?
- The government announced the MSP for 17 ‘kharif’ crops, like paddy, pulses (moong, arhar, urad), oilseeds like groundnut and soyabean and cotton, for the marketing season of 2023-24. These were approved at a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA).
- The increase in MSP is in line with the Union Budget 2018-19 announcement of fixing the MSP at a level of at least 1.5 times the all-India weighted average cost of production, which aims at a reasonably fair remuneration for the farmers.
Concerns of farmers:
- Several farmers’ outfits have expressed their discontentment over the latest MSP for the summer crops, terming it as insufficient. According to the All India Kisan Sabha, the declared MSP is “unfair, belies the hopes of the farmers and inflicts huge losses in their incomes.”
- Rising input costs coupled with unfair MSP will push large sections of farmers, especially the small, marginal, and middle-level farmers, as well as tenants into indebtedness.
- The longstanding promise made by the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014 that the MSP will be given according to the Swaminathan Commission recommendation of C2+50% (C2 or comprehensive cost of production) remains an unfulfilled election promise.
- Also, the government needs to make MSP a statutory right of the farmers. Farmers need to have an assurance that their crops will be purchased at the MSP to survive in the otherwise economically-unsustainable agricultural sector.
What are agriculture experts saying?
- The past track record shows that only three to four crops (mainly wheat, paddy and cotton and at times some pulses), were being procured at MSP while the remaining crops were being procured at much below the MSP.
- This is mainly because the farmers are left at the mercy of market forces and the private players. Non-implementation of MSP and below-MSP-procurement of a large number of crops, inter alia, has been one of the major hurdles in ‘crop diversification’ which is so vital for Indian agriculture and in saving the environment. Ineffective implementation of MSP and ‘non-procurement’ of all the crops at the MSP is also one of the main concerns of farmers.
- Such a scenario builds a strong rationale for giving ‘legal status’ to MSP as it is the floor or reference price. This does not imply that the government should procure all those crops but would certainly bind the private players to procure those crops at least at the MSP.
- While facilitating crop-diversification it would raise farmers’ income which is being propagated by the government.
What about foodgrain stock?
- As per third advance estimates for 2022-23, total foodgrain production in the country is estimated at a record 330.5 million tonnes which is higher by 14.9 million tonnes compared to 2021-22. This is the highest increase in the last five years, according to government data.
- The total stocks of rice and wheat held by Food Corporation of India (FCI) and State agencies as on May 1, 2023, was 555.34 lakh tonnes comprising 265.06 lakh tonnes of rice and 290.28 lakh tonnes of wheat.
What lies ahead?
- The MSP attempts to strike a balance between the interest of growers and consumers. The government’s price support policy attempts to provide a fair return to farmers while keeping in view the interest of consumers in a way that prices of food and other agricultural commodities are kept at a reasonable level. A rise in their income could be the long-term answer to farmers’ financial distress.
- To ensure this rise in income, the government should focus on setting up an effective system to provide assured purchase and returns to farmers for all major crops at the MSP, as is done in the case of wheat and rice or extend subsidies on input costs.
Scientists find a solar eruption that has maintained its temp for six yrs
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Why in news?
- Scientists in India found that a solar eruption that occurred in July 2017 has maintained its temperature for nearly six years, reported the Ministry of Science and Technology.
- Scientists have been tracking the continuous evolution of the energy state of the core of a solar eruption that occurred on July 20, 2017. They found that it had maintained a constant temperature.
How CMEs can disrupt the range of satellites and other technology on Earth?
- Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are large-scale eruptions of charged particles (plasma) and magnetic fields from the solar atmosphere into space.
- CMEs have potential destructive properties as they have their own magnetic field and can disrupt earth's magnetic field. It has also been known to cause electrical blackouts and disrupt radio transmissions.
- When the sun releases CMEs, charged particles, and magnetic fields are thrown into space.
- CMEs contain plasma at different temperatures, ranging from cold to extremely hot. As CMEs move, various processes can either heat up or cool down the plasma by exchanging different forms of energy.
- To understand these processes, scientists study the changes in properties like density, temperature, and thermal pressure of CMEs. This knowledge is crucial for monitoring space weather and its consequences on Earth.
- However, as CMEs evolve closer to the sun, within 3 times the sun's radius, observations in these regions have been limited.
What did the scientists find?
- The team of scientists from Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital and Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, USA tracked were part of the team tracking the CME.
- They observed that despite the core expanding, which would usually cause cooling, the temperature remained constant as it moved from 1.05 to 1.35 times the radius of the sun. They used data from ground-based and space-based instruments to support these findings.
- Additionally, they observed that the density of the core decreased by about 3.6 times as it moved outward.
- Based on their observations, the scientists concluded that the expansion of the core behaved more like an isothermal process (constant temperature) rather than an adiabatic process (where heat exchange occurs).
Future prospects:
- In the future, India's Aditya-L1 mission, equipped with the visible emission line coronagraph (VELC), will provide more data about CMEs in the inner corona. Analysing this data will offer new insights into the evolution of CME properties in that region.
- A similar kind of analysis using VELC data will provide new insights of the evolution of CME thermodynamic properties in the inner corona.
