Arvind Singh Rathore was born in 1989, which was the year before his grandfather, (late) Thakur Datar Singh Rathore, and his father, Thakur Santosh Singh Rathore, began cultivating soybean on their ancestral farmland in Muradpura, a village on the outskirts of Indore in Madhya Pradesh. The oilseed was quite new to farmers in this area even though others in the State had been sowing it as far back as the late 1970s and early 1980s. Arvind grew up helping his family earn a living growing soybean. For about 15 years now, he has been managing soybean on 25 acres of land, with the help of his father. But something has changed. The young farmer, also a district leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-supported Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, now wants to leave agriculture and look for another job in another sector. The reasons are many.

Even as the harvesting of soybean was going on, he found time to talk about some of the reasons. He said youngsters like him were no longer interested in farming due to multiple issues that ranged from climate change to the import-export policies of the Union Government. “The yield is very low this time,” he said. “We get two quintals to 2.5 quintals per acre now. There was a time when we used to get more than four quintals. This is less than half of what my grandfather and father used to get. The price is also almost a ₹1,000 less than what we used to get 15 years ago. We do not have any other alternative crops here as maize, a popular alternate crop, is what the nilgai likes.” The nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus) is an antelope species which farmers consider to be a nuisance as it destroys crops, Arvind pointed out.

Arvind has also been reaching out to his farmer friends on the impact that the possible import of soybean from the United States could have. “The government is already importing soybean oil and other edible oils. But if soybean is imported from the U.S., our crisis will deepen. The government should set its import-export policy right,” he says.

The MSP issue

There is another issue that he and other farmer leaders are engaged with, which is proper implementation of the minimum support price (MSP) and procurement by the government in local markets. In the ongoing kharif season, the government had announced ₹5,328 as the MSP for a quintal of soybean. But in the Chhawani grain market of Indore, farmers have been selling their produce for as low as ₹