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January
1ST Vidya Balan
1st Asrani
1st Nana Patekar
1st Sonali Bendre
2nd Bharat Shah
3rd Sanjay Khan
4th Aditya Pancholi
5th Uday Chopra
4th Gurdas Maan
5th Deepika Padukone
6th A R Rahman
6th Rameshwari
7th Irrfan Khan
7th Bipasha Basu
7th Reena Roy
9th Farhan Akhtar
9th Farah Khan
10th Hrithik Roshan
10th Kalki Koechlin
10th Pallavi Sharda
10th Basu Chatterjee
10th Pahlaj Nihalani
10th Yasudas
11th Reeta Bahaduri
12th Arun Govil
12th Pt. Shiv Kumar Sharma
13th Adhyayan Suman
13th Imran Khan
13th Ashmit Patel
15th Pritish Nandi
15th Neil Nitin Mukesh
16th Siddharth Malhotra
17th Javed Akhtar
17TH Maya Govind
17th Ramesh Taurani (Tips)
18th Minissha Lamba
19th Bhavdeep Jaipurwale
20th Raj Babbar
21st Sushant Singh Rajput
21ST Daboo Malik
23RD Ramesh Sippy
23rd Sudhakar Sharma
24th Subhash Ghai
24th Vinay Virmani
24th Riya Sen
25th Kavita Krishnamurthy
27th Bobby Deol
27th Shreyas Talpade
27th Vikram Bhatt
28th Shruti Haasan
30th Priyadarshan
30th Chandan Roy Sanyal
31st Ashok Honda
31st Preity Zinta
31st Amy Jackson
February
1st Jackie Shroff
1st Manoj Tiwari
1st Anwar
1st Shobha Kapoor
3rd Waheeda Rehman
4th Urmila Matondkar
5th Abhishek Bachchan
9th Indra Kumar
10th Louis Bank
11th Rajat Kapoor
11th Sherylin Chopra
11th Tina Ambani
12th Mitali Singh
14th Manoj Desai
15th Harish Bhimani
15th Randhir Kapoor
15th Sonu Nigam
16th Arunoday Singh
16th Nidhi Subbaiah
18th Sajid Nadiadwala
20th Annu Kapoor
22nd Sooraj Barjatya
23rd Bhagyashree
24th Pooja Bhatt
24th Sameer
25th Sanjay Leela Bhansali
25th Shahid Kapoor
25th Danny Danzongpa
26th Veena Malik
27th Prakash Jha
28th Ravindra Jain
28th Varsha Usgoankar
March
1st Amit Khanna
2nd Vidya Malvade
3rd Shraddha Kapoor
3rd Shankar Mahadevan
5th Saurabh Shukla
5th Preety Bhalla
7th Anil Sharma
7th Anupam Kher
8th Farden Khan
9th Zakir Hussain
11th Poonam Pandey
11th Sujata Mehta
12th Aatif Aslam
12th Shreya Ghoshal
12TH Falguni Pathak
12TH Shreya Ghoshal
12th Kamaal Khan
13th Geeta Basra
13th Nimrat Kaur
14th Rohit Shetty
14th Aamir Khan
14th Sadhna Sargam
15th Alia Bhatt
15th Honey Singh
15th Ila Arun
15th Abhay Deol
16th Rajpal Yadav
16th Jolly Mukherjee
17th Lalit
18th Alisha Chinoy
18th Chitra Singh
18th Shashi Kapoor
20th Alka Yagnik
21st Rani Mukherjee
23rd Kangana Ranaut
24th Emraan Hashmi
26th Shilpi Sharma
26th Prakash Raj
27th Ram Charan Teja
28th Chitrangada Singh
29th Jagdeep
31st Prashant Narayan
April
2nd Ajay Devgan
2nd Remo D’Souza
3rd Jaya Prada
3rd Prabhu Deva
3rd Hariharan
3Rd Salma Agha
3rd Vipul Shah
3rd Raju Singh
7th Ram Gopal Varma
7th Jeetendra
8th Amit Trivedi
8th Saqib Saleem
9th Jaya Bachchan
9th Hans Raj Hans
10th Pravin Shah (Time)
11th Mohit Suri
11th Adinath Mangeshkar
11th Satish Kaushik
15th Shyam Benegal
16th Lara Dutt
17th Siddharth
17th Bindu
17TH Monty Sharma
18th Poonam Dhillon
19th Arshad Warsi
19th Vashu Bhagnani
19th Rohan Kapoor
20th Babita Kapoor
22nd Chetan Bhagat
23rd Manoj Bajpai
23th Sanjeev (Darshan)
24th Varun Dhawan
24th Kavita Paudwal
24th Rekha Rana
28th Sharman Joshi
28th Nikhil Adwani
28th Samantha Ruth Prabhu
MAY
1ST Anushka Sharma
6TH Vindoo Dara Singh
7th Ashwini Bhave
8TH Anurag Basu
8th Remo Fernandes
11Th Adah Sharma
13th Sunny Leone
13th Punit Malhotra
13th Divyendu Sharma
13th Manhar Udhas
14TH Talat Aziz
14th Zarine Khan
14th Maddhhurima Bannerjee
15th Madhuri Dixit
16th Sonal Chauhan
17TH Pankaj Udhas
17th Paresh Rawal
18TH Sonali Kulkarni
18th Farida Jalal
18th Ali Zafar
18th Ashok Khosla
19th Nawazuddin Siddiqui
19th Bali Sagoo
19th Kishan Kumar
20th Haasan Kamaal
21st Mukesh Tiwari
21st Aditya Chopra
21st Tia Bajpai
21st Dilraj Kaur
24th Arya Babbar
24th Rajesh Roshan
25th Karan Johar
25th Kunal Khemu
25th Uttam Singh
28th Gulshan Devaiah
29th Champak Jain
29th Pankaj Kapoor
29th Anand Tiwari
29th Lalita Munshaw
30th Paresh Rawal
31st Milind (Anand)
31st Vir Das
June
1st R Madhvan
1st Ismail Darbar
2nd Sonakshi Sinha
2nd Illayaraja
3rd Sarika
4th Ashok Saraf
4th Anil Ambani
5TH Mukesh Bhatt
5th Viju Shah
6th Preety Sagar
7th Sanjay Gadhvi
7th Ekta Kapoor
8th Shilpa Shetty
8th Dimple Kapadia
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9th Ameesha Patel
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10th Roop Kumar Rathod
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16th Mithun Chakraborty
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17th Amrita Rao
17th Lisa Haydon
19th Kaajal Aggarwal
19th Raajesh Johri
20th Shweta Pandit
21st Shiv Pandit
21st Dibkar Bannerjee
22rd Anubhav Sinha
23rd Penaz Masani
25th Raghubir Yadav
25th Satish Shah
25th Aftab Shivdasani
25th Karisma Kapoor
26th Arjun Kapoor
28th Vishal Dadlani
30th Sapna Awasthi
July
1st Rhea Chakraborty
1st Mehul Kumar
1st Pt. Hari Prasad Chaurasya
1st Sudesh Bhosle
2nd Mohd. Aziz
3rd Amit Kumar
3rd Tigmanshu Dhulia
4th Chhaya Ganguly
5th Raj Kumar Santoshi
5TH Kumar Taurani
6th Ranveer Singh
6th Bali Brahmbhatt
7th Rakeysh Om Prakash Mehra
7th Kailash Kher
7th Siddharth Kak
7th Chandrashekhar
7th Manjot Singh
8th Neetu Singh Kapoor
9th Tabassum
10th Parveen Sultana
10th Ibrahim Ashq
11th Mahalaxmi Iyyer
12th Evelyn Sharma
12th Vinay Pathak
13th Sarita Sethi
16th Katrina Kaif
17th Zarina Wahab
17th Ravi Kissan
18th Priyanka Chopra
18th Rajeev Rai
18th Sukhwinder Singh
19th Sneha Pant
20th Naseeruddin Shah
21st Madhu Shalini
23rd Himesh Reshammiya
23rd Penaz Masani
23rd Mukesh Khanna
23rd Jeetu (Jeetu-Tapan)
25th Raageshwari Sachdev
26th Mugdha Godse
27th Rahul Bose
27th Uddbhav Thackarey
28th Dhanush
28th Huma Qureshi
29TH Sanjay Dutt
29th Pamela Chopra
29th Anup Jalota
29Th Elli Avram
30th Sonu Sood
30th Sonu Nigam
30th Mahaakshay Chakraborty
August
1st Keval Kumar
1st Taapsee Pannu
2nd Siddharth Roy Kapur
2nd Yuvika Chaudhary
2nd Ruslaan Mumtaz
3rd Manish Paul
4TH Arbaaz Khan
4th Vishal Bhardwaj
4th Sharon Prabhakar
5th Genelia D’Souza Deshmukh
5th Kajol
5th Ganesh Jain
6th Aditya Narayan
6th Umesh Mehra
6th Daler Mehndi
6th Vishal Bharadwaj
7th Suresh Wadkar
7th Shaurya Chauhan
7th Sachin Joshi
9th Saawan Kumar Tak
9th Sulakshana Pandit
11th Sunil Shetty
11TH Jacqueline Fernandez
13TH Shridevi
14th Johny Lever
14th Poonam Jhawer
14th Sunidhi Chauhan
15th Adnan Sami
15th Raakhee
16th Hemlata
16th Manisha Koirala
16th David Dhawan
16th Saif Ali Khan
16th Mahesh Manjrekar
16th David Dhawan
17th Ketan Desai
17th Sachin
17th Smita Thackeray
18th Ranvir Shorey
18th Gulzar
19TH Ken Ghosh
20th Randeep Hoonda
20th Amrita Puri
21st Sana Khan
22nd Paintal
23rd K K
23RD Saira Banu
23th Vaani Kapoor
24th Ayaan Mukherji
26th Madhur Bhandarkar
27th Neha Dhupia
29th Richa Sharma
28th Jugal Kishore
31st Sumeet Tapoo
31st Raj Kumar Yadav
September
1st Tochi Raina
1st Ram Kapoor
3rd Vivek Oberoi
3rd Shakti Kapoor
3rd Pyarelal Sharma
4th Govind Namdeo
4th Rishi Kapoor
4th Swara Baskar
4th Rahul B Seth
5th Vidhu Vinod Chopra
6th Abhinav Kashyap
6th Rakesh Roshan
6th Poornima
8th Asha Bhosle
8th Rajendra Mehta
9th Lucky Ali
9th Akshay Kumar
9th Ustad Amjad Ali Khan
10th Atul Kulkarni
10th Anurag Kashyap
11TH Shriya Saran
12th Ranjeet
12th Vinod Rathod
12th Prachi Desai
12th Durga Jasraj
13th Mahima Chaudhry
14th Sunita Rao
14th Ayushmann Khurrana
16th Prasoon Joshi
16TH Ram Laxman
16TH Aditya Paudwal
17th Priya Anand
17th Aditya Paudwal
18th Shabana Azmi
19TH Lucky Ali
19th Shashwati Phookan
19th Eesha Kopikhar
20th Mahesh Bhatt
21st Kareena Kapoor
21st Gulshan Grover
21st Rimi Sen
22nd Kumar Sanu
23th Prem Chopra
23rd Manoj Kumar
25th Divya Dutta
25TH Nitin Manmohan
26th Anjali Patil
27th Dheeraj Kumar
27th Chunky Pandey
28th Ranbir Kapoor
28th Lata Mangeshkar
28th Deane Sequeira
29th Isha Sharvani
30th Shaan
October
1st Asha Parekh
2nd Kay Kay Menon
2ND Kalpana
4th Soha Ali Khan
4th Shailendra Singh
4th Paoli Dam
6th Vinod Khanna
7th Wajid (Sajid Wajid)
7TH Usha Khanna
7TH Abhijeet Sawant
7th Mehboob
9th Khushboo Jain
8th Rajesh Sharma
10th Rekha
11th Amitabh Bachchan
11TH Ronit Roy
11th Chandrachur Singh
11th Pradeep Udhas
12th Kunaal Roy Kapur
12th Nida Fazli
14th Zoya Akhtar
15th Nikhil Kamath
15th Ali Faisal
15th Altaf Raja
15th Lalit Sen
16th Hema Malini
16th Rajeev Khandewal
16th Prithvirajsukumaran
17th Simi Garewal
18th Om Puri
18th Kunaal Kapoor
19th Shiamak Davar
19TH Sunny Deol
20th Nargis Fakhri
20th Sonu Kakkar
22nd Kader Khan
22nd Parineeta Chopra
23rd Sapna Mukherjee
23rd Malaika Arora Khan
23rd Sanjay Gupta
24rd Himani Shivpuri
24th Mallika Sherawat
24th Bruna Abdullah
25th Monica Dogra
26th Raveena Tandon
26th Shabbir Kumar
26th Hridaynath Mangeshkar
26th Asin Thottumkal
27th Anuradha Paudwal
27th Vasundhara Das
28th Aditya Rao Hydari
30th Dilip Tahil
30TH Abu Malik
30th Abhijeet
31st Surendra Sodhi
November
1st Anu Malik
1st Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
1st Tisca Chopra
1st Ileana D’ Çruz
1st Padmini Kolhapure
2nd Diana Penty
2nd Shah Rukh Khan
2nd Madhushree
2nd Devang Patel
4th Tabu
5TH Javed Ali
7th Kamal Haasan
7th Raima Sen
7TH Nandita Das
8TH Dhirubhai Shah (Time)
8th Usha Uthup
9th Anand Raj Anand
9TH Payal Rohatgi
9th Subodh Bhave
13th Shravan Rathod
13th Juhi Chawla
13th Deipa Udit Narayan
14th Jaspinder Narula
14th Madan Pal
15th Jr. Mehmood
15th Uday Mazumdar
16th Meenakshi Sheshadri
16th Aditya Roy Kapur
17th Jaswinder Singh
18th Zubeen Garg
19th Zeenat Aman
19th Sushmita Sen
20TH Tusshar Kapoor
21st Helen
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22nd Saroj Khan
23rd Baba Sehgal
23 Kartik Tiwari
23rd Sajid Khan
25th Rakhi Sawant
26th Arjun Rampal
27th Bappi Lahiri
27th Suchitra Krishnamurthy
27th Bhushan Kumar
28th Prateik Babbar
28TH Esha Gupta
28th Yami Gautam
30th Murli Sharma
December
1st Udit Narayan
1st Kainat Arora
1st Boman Irani
1st Rakesh Bedi
3rd Jimmy Shergil
3rd Konkana Sen Sharma
3rd Sara Jane Dias
4th Javed Jaffrey
6th Shekhar Kapur
6th B. Subhash
6th Vikramaditya Motwane
7th Shekhar Suman
8th Dharmendra
8th Shazahn Padamsee
9th Shatrughan Sinha
9th Dia Mirza
10th Vidyut Jamval
11th Dilip Kumar
11th Sara Loren
12th Rajnikant
12th Aman Trikha
14th Rana Duggabati
14th Biswajit
15th Babul Supriyo
15th Usha Mangeshkar
16th Harshdeep Kaur
17th John Abraham
17th Riteish Deshmukh
17th Suresh Oberoi
19TH Mahie Gill
21st Karisma Tannah
21st Tamannaah
21ST Amin Sayani
21st Govinda
21st Anand (Anand Milind)
24TH Anil Kapoor
25th Jackkie Bhagnani
25th Raju Shrivastav
27th Salman Khan
28th Richa Chaddha
29th Pulkit Samrat
29th Twinkle Khanna
30th Sonali Vajpai
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As election looms, Modi
KAIRANA, India (Reuters) – Indian farmers voted overwhelmingly for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2014 general election that swept him to power. He cannot count on them doing so again, as a crash in commodity prices and surging fuel costs stoke anger in the countryside.
Four years ago, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, winning 73 of 80 seats, as the rural poor – swayed by promises of higher crop prices – deserted the rival Congress party.
Now, facing criticism for not improving living standards in the countryside, where 70 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people live, analysts and farm economists said Modi would find it hard to repeat the feat in a general election due by May 2019.
While it is risky to predict election outcomes in India, where religion and caste remain important issues – not to mention the influence of fickle regional parties – interviews with some of the state’s millions of farmers suggest rural angst could cost the government dearly.
“No doubt, there was a wave for Modi in 2014, but farmers are disenchanted with him now,” said sugar cane grower Uday Vir Singh, 53, plonking down on a wicker chair and smoking his hookah. “Modi promised to double farmers’ income but our earning has halved because of his apathy and anti-farmer policies.”
Nearly half a dozen farmers sitting with Singh on a hand-woven rope cot, and many of others in Kairana – which elected a joint opposition candidate from a small regional party in a key by-election this week – accused Modi and the Uttar Pradesh administration, also run by the BJP, of failing to live up to their promises and overlooking the concerns of villagers.
“Modi is a very good salesman but we are not going to fall prey to his glib talk again,” said 55-year-old Narendra Kalhande, who grows cane on his 2.5 acre farm.
Farm Minister Radha Mohan Singh defended the government’s record, citing initiatives on irrigation, crop insurance and electronic trading platforms for farmers to sell produce.
“For farmers, Prime Minister Modi’s 48 months have been much better than the Congress’s rule of 48 years,” Singh told Reuters, referring to the main opposition party that dominated Indian politics for most of the years since independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
CRISIS IN COUNTRYSIDE
Higher inflation and sluggish growth helped Modi trounce Congress, which had long counted the rural poor as its core constituency, in the 2014 election. Small farmers had been hit by rising living costs but benefited little from rising food prices because of the web of middlemen in India’s agricultural markets.
Since then the economy has picked up, recording its quickest pace of expansion in nearly two years in the first three months of 2018, helped by higher growth in the farm sector.
But lower food prices, weaker farm wages and modest crop procurement rates – the result of a shift in focus from the subsidies favored by Congress to investment under the pro-business BJP – have hurt most of India’s 263 million farmers, who typically own less than 2 hectares of land.
In the past year, Modi’s popularity has fallen by 12 percentage points among farmers, according to a “Mood of the Nation” survey published last week by the Lokniti, part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a research institute.
Next year’s election would be fought on farmers’ issues, said Yogendra Yadav, a leading academic-turned-politician.
Farmer organizations in some states began a 10-strike on Friday, in which they have said they will stop selling produce to protest a steep drop in the prices of an array of farm goods.
Farm Minister Singh said his government had yet to hear from farm leaders but was ready to listen.
COMMODITIES CRASH
Prices of pulses, a key crop for Indian farmers, have fallen 25-30 percent below state-set support prices, as higher imports and bumper local crops bumped up supplies. While the government announces support prices for more than 20 crops each year to set a benchmark, state agencies actually buy only rice and wheat at the support level.
Vegetable prices, especially onions, cabbage and tomatoes have fallen 25 percent from last year, largely because of the lack of refrigerated trucks that could take the perishables to the consuming big cities.
Milk prices have also dived by more than 25 percent in the past year as a global glut has brought exports to a near halt.
Farmers in Charkhi Dadri, three hours’ drive west of the capital New Delhi, recently dumped tomatoes onto the road in protest after buyers offered a quarter of a rupee per kilogram for a crop that costs at least 6 rupees ($0.09) a kg to produce.
Jai Bhagwan, 54, borrowed 12,000 rupees to grow onions on a plot of about half acre in Jhajjar, an area otherwise famed for pottery. When his crop was ready, Jai Bhagwan could get only 1,200 rupees.
“I could not even recover my labor cost,” said Jai Bhagwan, who was in New Delhi recently to participate in a farmers’ meet.
Prakash Singh, also from Jhajjar, spent 6,000 rupees to grow green chilli, but the crop fetched him barely 200 rupees.
“I’m in debt up to my eyeballs. But I can’t sit idle, so I’ll have to borrow more to grow something else,” Singh said.
Ashok Gulati, a farm economist who advised India’s last government, said there were three policy options to support farmers: building state buffer stocks to soak up excess supply, acting to boost exports or building capacity for processing farm commodities into end products such as milled, dehusked pulses or vegetable oils.
Most of those measures would require long-term structural changes, however, and analysts predict in the run-up to the election Modi is likely to announce more populist, short-term fixes such as higher guaranteed prices for crops and farm loan waivers.
Many farmers complained they are still reeling from disruptions caused by the launch of a new nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST) in July 2017 and a ban on high denomination bank notes in November 2016.
Blaming the shock move for exacerbating farmers’ financial woes, Gulati said: “Expectations were high from the government, but the fact is that the plight of farmers is far worse now than what it was four years ago.”
Modi’s drive to purge “black money” from the economy by removing, at a stroke, 86 percent of the cash in circulation, made it difficult for farmers, who survive on cash, to buy inputs like seeds and receive payments for their crops.
In Kairana, all 35 farmers Reuters spoke to agreed that abolishing 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes had made things worse.
POWER SURGE
Farmers in Uttar Pradesh, home to 220 million people, are also angry over a sharp rise in the pump price of diesel and a steep hike in electricity tariffs.
Many farmers in the state use diesel to run tractors for plowing and trolleys for moving their produce to wholesale markets. They depend on electricity to operate irrigation pumps.
Diesel prices have shot up by more than 40 percent to record highs and electricity tariffs have surged by more 20 percent in the past two years, said Shri Pal, a farmer from Shamli.
“Villages account for most of India’s diesel consumption and that’s why higher prices pinch farmers the most, but diesel in India is much more expensive than Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka,” said Hannan Mollah, a former lawmaker and a senior official of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Kairana and Shamli lie in the sugar cane belt of Uttar Pradesh, the top sugar state of India, the world’s biggest producer after Brazil.
Soaring global output has caused a collapse in sugar prices, leading to losses for mills who now owe nearly 23 billion rupees to cane growers.
A BJP spokesman, G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, said the government has streamlined timely payments to cane growers.
That has not been enough to satisfy farmers such as Ram Lakhan Singh, a cane grower from Shamli.
“Most sugar mills have not paid us a single rupee since December and the government has connived with them to deprive us of our rightful dues. Trust me, cane farmers will think twice before voting for the BJP.”
Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; Editing by Alex Richardson
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As election looms, Modi
KAIRANA, India (Reuters) – Indian farmers voted overwhelmingly for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2014 general election that swept him to power. He cannot count on them doing so again, as a crash in commodity prices and surging fuel costs stoke anger in the countryside.
Four years ago, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, winning 73 of 80 seats, as the rural poor – swayed by promises of higher crop prices – deserted the rival Congress party.
Now, facing criticism for not improving living standards in the countryside, where 70 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people live, analysts and farm economists said Modi would find it hard to repeat the feat in a general election due by May 2019.
While it is risky to predict election outcomes in India, where religion and caste remain important issues – not to mention the influence of fickle regional parties – interviews with some of the state’s millions of farmers suggest rural angst could cost the government dearly.
“No doubt, there was a wave for Modi in 2014, but farmers are disenchanted with him now,” said sugar cane grower Uday Vir Singh, 53, plonking down on a wicker chair and smoking his hookah. “Modi promised to double farmers’ income but our earning has halved because of his apathy and anti-farmer policies.”
Nearly half a dozen farmers sitting with Singh on a hand-woven rope cot, and many of others in Kairana – which elected a joint opposition candidate from a small regional party in a key by-election this week – accused Modi and the Uttar Pradesh administration, also run by the BJP, of failing to live up to their promises and overlooking the concerns of villagers.
“Modi is a very good salesman but we are not going to fall prey to his glib talk again,” said 55-year-old Narendra Kalhande, who grows cane on his 2.5 acre farm.
Farm Minister Radha Mohan Singh defended the government’s record, citing initiatives on irrigation, crop insurance and electronic trading platforms for farmers to sell produce.
“For farmers, Prime Minister Modi’s 48 months have been much better than the Congress’s rule of 48 years,” Singh told Reuters, referring to the main opposition party that dominated Indian politics for most of the years since independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
CRISIS IN COUNTRYSIDE
Higher inflation and sluggish growth helped Modi trounce Congress, which had long counted the rural poor as its core constituency, in the 2014 election. Small farmers had been hit by rising living costs but benefited little from rising food prices because of the web of middlemen in India’s agricultural markets.
Since then the economy has picked up, recording its quickest pace of expansion in nearly two years in the first three months of 2018, helped by higher growth in the farm sector.
But lower food prices, weaker farm wages and modest crop procurement rates – the result of a shift in focus from the subsidies favored by Congress to investment under the pro-business BJP – have hurt most of India’s 263 million farmers, who typically own less than 2 hectares of land.
In the past year, Modi’s popularity has fallen by 12 percentage points among farmers, according to a “Mood of the Nation” survey published last week by the Lokniti, part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a research institute.
Next year’s election would be fought on farmers’ issues, said Yogendra Yadav, a leading academic-turned-politician.
Farmer organizations in some states began a 10-strike on Friday, in which they have said they will stop selling produce to protest a steep drop in the prices of an array of farm goods.
Farm Minister Singh said his government had yet to hear from farm leaders but was ready to listen.
COMMODITIES CRASH
Prices of pulses, a key crop for Indian farmers, have fallen 25-30 percent below state-set support prices, as higher imports and bumper local crops bumped up supplies. While the government announces support prices for more than 20 crops each year to set a benchmark, state agencies actually buy only rice and wheat at the support level.
Vegetable prices, especially onions, cabbage and tomatoes have fallen 25 percent from last year, largely because of the lack of refrigerated trucks that could take the perishables to the consuming big cities.
Milk prices have also dived by more than 25 percent in the past year as a global glut has brought exports to a near halt.
Farmers in Charkhi Dadri, three hours’ drive west of the capital New Delhi, recently dumped tomatoes onto the road in protest after buyers offered a quarter of a rupee per kilogram for a crop that costs at least 6 rupees ($0.09) a kg to produce.
Jai Bhagwan, 54, borrowed 12,000 rupees to grow onions on a plot of about half acre in Jhajjar, an area otherwise famed for pottery. When his crop was ready, Jai Bhagwan could get only 1,200 rupees.
“I could not even recover my labor cost,” said Jai Bhagwan, who was in New Delhi recently to participate in a farmers’ meet.
Prakash Singh, also from Jhajjar, spent 6,000 rupees to grow green chilli, but the crop fetched him barely 200 rupees.
“I’m in debt up to my eyeballs. But I can’t sit idle, so I’ll have to borrow more to grow something else,” Singh said.
Ashok Gulati, a farm economist who advised India’s last government, said there were three policy options to support farmers: building state buffer stocks to soak up excess supply, acting to boost exports or building capacity for processing farm commodities into end products such as milled, dehusked pulses or vegetable oils.
Most of those measures would require long-term structural changes, however, and analysts predict in the run-up to the election Modi is likely to announce more populist, short-term fixes such as higher guaranteed prices for crops and farm loan waivers.
Many farmers complained they are still reeling from disruptions caused by the launch of a new nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST) in July 2017 and a ban on high denomination bank notes in November 2016.
Blaming the shock move for exacerbating farmers’ financial woes, Gulati said: “Expectations were high from the government, but the fact is that the plight of farmers is far worse now than what it was four years ago.”
Modi’s drive to purge “black money” from the economy by removing, at a stroke, 86 percent of the cash in circulation, made it difficult for farmers, who survive on cash, to buy inputs like seeds and receive payments for their crops.
In Kairana, all 35 farmers Reuters spoke to agreed that abolishing 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes had made things worse.
POWER SURGE
Farmers in Uttar Pradesh, home to 220 million people, are also angry over a sharp rise in the pump price of diesel and a steep hike in electricity tariffs.
Many farmers in the state use diesel to run tractors for plowing and trolleys for moving their produce to wholesale markets. They depend on electricity to operate irrigation pumps.
Diesel prices have shot up by more than 40 percent to record highs and electricity tariffs have surged by more 20 percent in the past two years, said Shri Pal, a farmer from Shamli.
“Villages account for most of India’s diesel consumption and that’s why higher prices pinch farmers the most, but diesel in India is much more expensive than Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka,” said Hannan Mollah, a former lawmaker and a senior official of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Kairana and Shamli lie in the sugar cane belt of Uttar Pradesh, the top sugar state of India, the world’s biggest producer after Brazil.
Soaring global output has caused a collapse in sugar prices, leading to losses for mills who now owe nearly 23 billion rupees to cane growers.
A BJP spokesman, G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, said the government has streamlined timely payments to cane growers.
That has not been enough to satisfy farmers such as Ram Lakhan Singh, a cane grower from Shamli.
“Most sugar mills have not paid us a single rupee since December and the government has connived with them to deprive us of our rightful dues. Trust me, cane farmers will think twice before voting for the BJP.”
Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; Editing by Alex Richardson
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As election looms, Modi
KAIRANA, India (Reuters) – Indian farmers voted overwhelmingly for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2014 general election that swept him to power. He cannot count on them doing so again, as a crash in commodity prices and surging fuel costs stoke anger in the countryside.
Four years ago, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, winning 73 of 80 seats, as the rural poor – swayed by promises of higher crop prices – deserted the rival Congress party.
Now, facing criticism for not improving living standards in the countryside, where 70 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people live, analysts and farm economists said Modi would find it hard to repeat the feat in a general election due by May 2019.
While it is risky to predict election outcomes in India, where religion and caste remain important issues – not to mention the influence of fickle regional parties – interviews with some of the state’s millions of farmers suggest rural angst could cost the government dearly.
“No doubt, there was a wave for Modi in 2014, but farmers are disenchanted with him now,” said sugar cane grower Uday Vir Singh, 53, plonking down on a wicker chair and smoking his hookah. “Modi promised to double farmers’ income but our earning has halved because of his apathy and anti-farmer policies.”
Nearly half a dozen farmers sitting with Singh on a hand-woven rope cot, and many of others in Kairana – which elected a joint opposition candidate from a small regional party in a key by-election this week – accused Modi and the Uttar Pradesh administration, also run by the BJP, of failing to live up to their promises and overlooking the concerns of villagers.
“Modi is a very good salesman but we are not going to fall prey to his glib talk again,” said 55-year-old Narendra Kalhande, who grows cane on his 2.5 acre farm.
Farm Minister Radha Mohan Singh defended the government’s record, citing initiatives on irrigation, crop insurance and electronic trading platforms for farmers to sell produce.
“For farmers, Prime Minister Modi’s 48 months have been much better than the Congress’s rule of 48 years,” Singh told Reuters, referring to the main opposition party that dominated Indian politics for most of the years since independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
CRISIS IN COUNTRYSIDE
Higher inflation and sluggish growth helped Modi trounce Congress, which had long counted the rural poor as its core constituency, in the 2014 election. Small farmers had been hit by rising living costs but benefited little from rising food prices because of the web of middlemen in India’s agricultural markets.
Since then the economy has picked up, recording its quickest pace of expansion in nearly two years in the first three months of 2018, helped by higher growth in the farm sector.
But lower food prices, weaker farm wages and modest crop procurement rates – the result of a shift in focus from the subsidies favored by Congress to investment under the pro-business BJP – have hurt most of India’s 263 million farmers, who typically own less than 2 hectares of land.
In the past year, Modi’s popularity has fallen by 12 percentage points among farmers, according to a “Mood of the Nation” survey published last week by the Lokniti, part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a research institute.
Next year’s election would be fought on farmers’ issues, said Yogendra Yadav, a leading academic-turned-politician.
Farmer organizations in some states began a 10-strike on Friday, in which they have said they will stop selling produce to protest a steep drop in the prices of an array of farm goods.
Farm Minister Singh said his government had yet to hear from farm leaders but was ready to listen.
COMMODITIES CRASH
Prices of pulses, a key crop for Indian farmers, have fallen 25-30 percent below state-set support prices, as higher imports and bumper local crops bumped up supplies. While the government announces support prices for more than 20 crops each year to set a benchmark, state agencies actually buy only rice and wheat at the support level.
Vegetable prices, especially onions, cabbage and tomatoes have fallen 25 percent from last year, largely because of the lack of refrigerated trucks that could take the perishables to the consuming big cities.
Milk prices have also dived by more than 25 percent in the past year as a global glut has brought exports to a near halt.
Farmers in Charkhi Dadri, three hours’ drive west of the capital New Delhi, recently dumped tomatoes onto the road in protest after buyers offered a quarter of a rupee per kilogram for a crop that costs at least 6 rupees ($0.09) a kg to produce.
Jai Bhagwan, 54, borrowed 12,000 rupees to grow onions on a plot of about half acre in Jhajjar, an area otherwise famed for pottery. When his crop was ready, Jai Bhagwan could get only 1,200 rupees.
“I could not even recover my labor cost,” said Jai Bhagwan, who was in New Delhi recently to participate in a farmers’ meet.
Prakash Singh, also from Jhajjar, spent 6,000 rupees to grow green chilli, but the crop fetched him barely 200 rupees.
“I’m in debt up to my eyeballs. But I can’t sit idle, so I’ll have to borrow more to grow something else,” Singh said.
Ashok Gulati, a farm economist who advised India’s last government, said there were three policy options to support farmers: building state buffer stocks to soak up excess supply, acting to boost exports or building capacity for processing farm commodities into end products such as milled, dehusked pulses or vegetable oils.
Most of those measures would require long-term structural changes, however, and analysts predict in the run-up to the election Modi is likely to announce more populist, short-term fixes such as higher guaranteed prices for crops and farm loan waivers.
Many farmers complained they are still reeling from disruptions caused by the launch of a new nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST) in July 2017 and a ban on high denomination bank notes in November 2016.
Blaming the shock move for exacerbating farmers’ financial woes, Gulati said: “Expectations were high from the government, but the fact is that the plight of farmers is far worse now than what it was four years ago.”
Modi’s drive to purge “black money” from the economy by removing, at a stroke, 86 percent of the cash in circulation, made it difficult for farmers, who survive on cash, to buy inputs like seeds and receive payments for their crops.
In Kairana, all 35 farmers Reuters spoke to agreed that abolishing 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes had made things worse.
POWER SURGE
Farmers in Uttar Pradesh, home to 220 million people, are also angry over a sharp rise in the pump price of diesel and a steep hike in electricity tariffs.
Many farmers in the state use diesel to run tractors for plowing and trolleys for moving their produce to wholesale markets. They depend on electricity to operate irrigation pumps.
Diesel prices have shot up by more than 40 percent to record highs and electricity tariffs have surged by more 20 percent in the past two years, said Shri Pal, a farmer from Shamli.
“Villages account for most of India’s diesel consumption and that’s why higher prices pinch farmers the most, but diesel in India is much more expensive than Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka,” said Hannan Mollah, a former lawmaker and a senior official of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Kairana and Shamli lie in the sugar cane belt of Uttar Pradesh, the top sugar state of India, the world’s biggest producer after Brazil.
Soaring global output has caused a collapse in sugar prices, leading to losses for mills who now owe nearly 23 billion rupees to cane growers.
A BJP spokesman, G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, said the government has streamlined timely payments to cane growers.
That has not been enough to satisfy farmers such as Ram Lakhan Singh, a cane grower from Shamli.
“Most sugar mills have not paid us a single rupee since December and the government has connived with them to deprive us of our rightful dues. Trust me, cane farmers will think twice before voting for the BJP.”
Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; Editing by Alex Richardson
The post As election looms, Modi appeared first on World The News.
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As election looms, Modi
KAIRANA, India (Reuters) – Indian farmers voted overwhelmingly for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2014 general election that swept him to power. He cannot count on them doing so again, as a crash in commodity prices and surging fuel costs stoke anger in the countryside.
Four years ago, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, winning 73 of 80 seats, as the rural poor – swayed by promises of higher crop prices – deserted the rival Congress party.
Now, facing criticism for not improving living standards in the countryside, where 70 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people live, analysts and farm economists said Modi would find it hard to repeat the feat in a general election due by May 2019.
While it is risky to predict election outcomes in India, where religion and caste remain important issues – not to mention the influence of fickle regional parties – interviews with some of the state’s millions of farmers suggest rural angst could cost the government dearly.
“No doubt, there was a wave for Modi in 2014, but farmers are disenchanted with him now,” said sugar cane grower Uday Vir Singh, 53, plonking down on a wicker chair and smoking his hookah. “Modi promised to double farmers’ income but our earning has halved because of his apathy and anti-farmer policies.”
Nearly half a dozen farmers sitting with Singh on a hand-woven rope cot, and many of others in Kairana – which elected a joint opposition candidate from a small regional party in a key by-election this week – accused Modi and the Uttar Pradesh administration, also run by the BJP, of failing to live up to their promises and overlooking the concerns of villagers.
“Modi is a very good salesman but we are not going to fall prey to his glib talk again,” said 55-year-old Narendra Kalhande, who grows cane on his 2.5 acre farm.
Farm Minister Radha Mohan Singh defended the government’s record, citing initiatives on irrigation, crop insurance and electronic trading platforms for farmers to sell produce.
“For farmers, Prime Minister Modi’s 48 months have been much better than the Congress’s rule of 48 years,” Singh told Reuters, referring to the main opposition party that dominated Indian politics for most of the years since independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
CRISIS IN COUNTRYSIDE
Higher inflation and sluggish growth helped Modi trounce Congress, which had long counted the rural poor as its core constituency, in the 2014 election. Small farmers had been hit by rising living costs but benefited little from rising food prices because of the web of middlemen in India’s agricultural markets.
Since then the economy has picked up, recording its quickest pace of expansion in nearly two years in the first three months of 2018, helped by higher growth in the farm sector.
But lower food prices, weaker farm wages and modest crop procurement rates – the result of a shift in focus from the subsidies favored by Congress to investment under the pro-business BJP – have hurt most of India’s 263 million farmers, who typically own less than 2 hectares of land.
In the past year, Modi’s popularity has fallen by 12 percentage points among farmers, according to a “Mood of the Nation” survey published last week by the Lokniti, part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a research institute.
Next year’s election would be fought on farmers’ issues, said Yogendra Yadav, a leading academic-turned-politician.
Farmer organizations in some states began a 10-strike on Friday, in which they have said they will stop selling produce to protest a steep drop in the prices of an array of farm goods.
Farm Minister Singh said his government had yet to hear from farm leaders but was ready to listen.
COMMODITIES CRASH
Prices of pulses, a key crop for Indian farmers, have fallen 25-30 percent below state-set support prices, as higher imports and bumper local crops bumped up supplies. While the government announces support prices for more than 20 crops each year to set a benchmark, state agencies actually buy only rice and wheat at the support level.
Vegetable prices, especially onions, cabbage and tomatoes have fallen 25 percent from last year, largely because of the lack of refrigerated trucks that could take the perishables to the consuming big cities.
Milk prices have also dived by more than 25 percent in the past year as a global glut has brought exports to a near halt.
Farmers in Charkhi Dadri, three hours’ drive west of the capital New Delhi, recently dumped tomatoes onto the road in protest after buyers offered a quarter of a rupee per kilogram for a crop that costs at least 6 rupees ($0.09) a kg to produce.
Jai Bhagwan, 54, borrowed 12,000 rupees to grow onions on a plot of about half acre in Jhajjar, an area otherwise famed for pottery. When his crop was ready, Jai Bhagwan could get only 1,200 rupees.
“I could not even recover my labor cost,” said Jai Bhagwan, who was in New Delhi recently to participate in a farmers’ meet.
Prakash Singh, also from Jhajjar, spent 6,000 rupees to grow green chilli, but the crop fetched him barely 200 rupees.
“I’m in debt up to my eyeballs. But I can’t sit idle, so I’ll have to borrow more to grow something else,” Singh said.
Ashok Gulati, a farm economist who advised India’s last government, said there were three policy options to support farmers: building state buffer stocks to soak up excess supply, acting to boost exports or building capacity for processing farm commodities into end products such as milled, dehusked pulses or vegetable oils.
Most of those measures would require long-term structural changes, however, and analysts predict in the run-up to the election Modi is likely to announce more populist, short-term fixes such as higher guaranteed prices for crops and farm loan waivers.
Many farmers complained they are still reeling from disruptions caused by the launch of a new nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST) in July 2017 and a ban on high denomination bank notes in November 2016.
Blaming the shock move for exacerbating farmers’ financial woes, Gulati said: “Expectations were high from the government, but the fact is that the plight of farmers is far worse now than what it was four years ago.”
Modi’s drive to purge “black money” from the economy by removing, at a stroke, 86 percent of the cash in circulation, made it difficult for farmers, who survive on cash, to buy inputs like seeds and receive payments for their crops.
In Kairana, all 35 farmers Reuters spoke to agreed that abolishing 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes had made things worse.
POWER SURGE
Farmers in Uttar Pradesh, home to 220 million people, are also angry over a sharp rise in the pump price of diesel and a steep hike in electricity tariffs.
Many farmers in the state use diesel to run tractors for plowing and trolleys for moving their produce to wholesale markets. They depend on electricity to operate irrigation pumps.
Diesel prices have shot up by more than 40 percent to record highs and electricity tariffs have surged by more 20 percent in the past two years, said Shri Pal, a farmer from Shamli.
“Villages account for most of India’s diesel consumption and that’s why higher prices pinch farmers the most, but diesel in India is much more expensive than Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka,” said Hannan Mollah, a former lawmaker and a senior official of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Kairana and Shamli lie in the sugar cane belt of Uttar Pradesh, the top sugar state of India, the world’s biggest producer after Brazil.
Soaring global output has caused a collapse in sugar prices, leading to losses for mills who now owe nearly 23 billion rupees to cane growers.
A BJP spokesman, G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, said the government has streamlined timely payments to cane growers.
That has not been enough to satisfy farmers such as Ram Lakhan Singh, a cane grower from Shamli.
“Most sugar mills have not paid us a single rupee since December and the government has connived with them to deprive us of our rightful dues. Trust me, cane farmers will think twice before voting for the BJP.”
Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; Editing by Alex Richardson
The post As election looms, Modi appeared first on World The News.
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As election looms, Modi
KAIRANA, India (Reuters) – Indian farmers voted overwhelmingly for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2014 general election that swept him to power. He cannot count on them doing so again, as a crash in commodity prices and surging fuel costs stoke anger in the countryside.
Four years ago, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, winning 73 of 80 seats, as the rural poor – swayed by promises of higher crop prices – deserted the rival Congress party.
Now, facing criticism for not improving living standards in the countryside, where 70 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people live, analysts and farm economists said Modi would find it hard to repeat the feat in a general election due by May 2019.
While it is risky to predict election outcomes in India, where religion and caste remain important issues – not to mention the influence of fickle regional parties – interviews with some of the state’s millions of farmers suggest rural angst could cost the government dearly.
“No doubt, there was a wave for Modi in 2014, but farmers are disenchanted with him now,” said sugar cane grower Uday Vir Singh, 53, plonking down on a wicker chair and smoking his hookah. “Modi promised to double farmers’ income but our earning has halved because of his apathy and anti-farmer policies.”
Nearly half a dozen farmers sitting with Singh on a hand-woven rope cot, and many of others in Kairana – which elected a joint opposition candidate from a small regional party in a key by-election this week – accused Modi and the Uttar Pradesh administration, also run by the BJP, of failing to live up to their promises and overlooking the concerns of villagers.
“Modi is a very good salesman but we are not going to fall prey to his glib talk again,” said 55-year-old Narendra Kalhande, who grows cane on his 2.5 acre farm.
Farm Minister Radha Mohan Singh defended the government’s record, citing initiatives on irrigation, crop insurance and electronic trading platforms for farmers to sell produce.
“For farmers, Prime Minister Modi’s 48 months have been much better than the Congress’s rule of 48 years,” Singh told Reuters, referring to the main opposition party that dominated Indian politics for most of the years since independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
CRISIS IN COUNTRYSIDE
Higher inflation and sluggish growth helped Modi trounce Congress, which had long counted the rural poor as its core constituency, in the 2014 election. Small farmers had been hit by rising living costs but benefited little from rising food prices because of the web of middlemen in India’s agricultural markets.
Since then the economy has picked up, recording its quickest pace of expansion in nearly two years in the first three months of 2018, helped by higher growth in the farm sector.
But lower food prices, weaker farm wages and modest crop procurement rates – the result of a shift in focus from the subsidies favored by Congress to investment under the pro-business BJP – have hurt most of India’s 263 million farmers, who typically own less than 2 hectares of land.
In the past year, Modi’s popularity has fallen by 12 percentage points among farmers, according to a “Mood of the Nation” survey published last week by the Lokniti, part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a research institute.
Next year’s election would be fought on farmers’ issues, said Yogendra Yadav, a leading academic-turned-politician.
Farmer organizations in some states began a 10-strike on Friday, in which they have said they will stop selling produce to protest a steep drop in the prices of an array of farm goods.
Farm Minister Singh said his government had yet to hear from farm leaders but was ready to listen.
COMMODITIES CRASH
Prices of pulses, a key crop for Indian farmers, have fallen 25-30 percent below state-set support prices, as higher imports and bumper local crops bumped up supplies. While the government announces support prices for more than 20 crops each year to set a benchmark, state agencies actually buy only rice and wheat at the support level.
Vegetable prices, especially onions, cabbage and tomatoes have fallen 25 percent from last year, largely because of the lack of refrigerated trucks that could take the perishables to the consuming big cities.
Milk prices have also dived by more than 25 percent in the past year as a global glut has brought exports to a near halt.
Farmers in Charkhi Dadri, three hours’ drive west of the capital New Delhi, recently dumped tomatoes onto the road in protest after buyers offered a quarter of a rupee per kilogram for a crop that costs at least 6 rupees ($0.09) a kg to produce.
Jai Bhagwan, 54, borrowed 12,000 rupees to grow onions on a plot of about half acre in Jhajjar, an area otherwise famed for pottery. When his crop was ready, Jai Bhagwan could get only 1,200 rupees.
“I could not even recover my labor cost,” said Jai Bhagwan, who was in New Delhi recently to participate in a farmers’ meet.
Prakash Singh, also from Jhajjar, spent 6,000 rupees to grow green chilli, but the crop fetched him barely 200 rupees.
“I’m in debt up to my eyeballs. But I can’t sit idle, so I’ll have to borrow more to grow something else,” Singh said.
Ashok Gulati, a farm economist who advised India’s last government, said there were three policy options to support farmers: building state buffer stocks to soak up excess supply, acting to boost exports or building capacity for processing farm commodities into end products such as milled, dehusked pulses or vegetable oils.
Most of those measures would require long-term structural changes, however, and analysts predict in the run-up to the election Modi is likely to announce more populist, short-term fixes such as higher guaranteed prices for crops and farm loan waivers.
Many farmers complained they are still reeling from disruptions caused by the launch of a new nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST) in July 2017 and a ban on high denomination bank notes in November 2016.
Blaming the shock move for exacerbating farmers’ financial woes, Gulati said: “Expectations were high from the government, but the fact is that the plight of farmers is far worse now than what it was four years ago.”
Modi’s drive to purge “black money” from the economy by removing, at a stroke, 86 percent of the cash in circulation, made it difficult for farmers, who survive on cash, to buy inputs like seeds and receive payments for their crops.
In Kairana, all 35 farmers Reuters spoke to agreed that abolishing 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes had made things worse.
POWER SURGE
Farmers in Uttar Pradesh, home to 220 million people, are also angry over a sharp rise in the pump price of diesel and a steep hike in electricity tariffs.
Many farmers in the state use diesel to run tractors for plowing and trolleys for moving their produce to wholesale markets. They depend on electricity to operate irrigation pumps.
Diesel prices have shot up by more than 40 percent to record highs and electricity tariffs have surged by more 20 percent in the past two years, said Shri Pal, a farmer from Shamli.
“Villages account for most of India’s diesel consumption and that’s why higher prices pinch farmers the most, but diesel in India is much more expensive than Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka,” said Hannan Mollah, a former lawmaker and a senior official of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Kairana and Shamli lie in the sugar cane belt of Uttar Pradesh, the top sugar state of India, the world’s biggest producer after Brazil.
Soaring global output has caused a collapse in sugar prices, leading to losses for mills who now owe nearly 23 billion rupees to cane growers.
A BJP spokesman, G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, said the government has streamlined timely payments to cane growers.
That has not been enough to satisfy farmers such as Ram Lakhan Singh, a cane grower from Shamli.
“Most sugar mills have not paid us a single rupee since December and the government has connived with them to deprive us of our rightful dues. Trust me, cane farmers will think twice before voting for the BJP.”
Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; Editing by Alex Richardson
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