Farm Incomes – Income Security for Farmers

ASHA has been one of those rare farm organisations in India to put forward a demand for a legal guarantee of minimum living incomes for each farm household in the country. ASHA believes that everything that the State creates as policies and programmes for agriculture and farmers in the country should necessarily translate into living incomes for all farmers. Using various other metrics to measure the impact of interventions like price support, crop insurance, technology introduction, agricultural credit etc. etc. is not useful, if farmers incomes are not dignified, adequate and stable.  When ASHA proposed Income Security Guarantee as a key struggle for future, to established farmers’ unions in the country, the response was lukewarm. It was as though they did not want to give up their existing articulation around MSP. Realising that remunerative MSPs are in any case for securing minimum living incomes, ASHA also started focusing on legalisation of MSP as an entitlement of all farmers. Meanwhile, the Government of India itself brought this into policy discourse, by promising to Double Farmers’ Incomes by 2022! ASHA Steering Group members were part of the working groups in the Dalwai Committee for Doubling Farmers’ Incomes.