Thirty-seven-year-old Pradeep Singh offered a meticulous breakdown of the amount of money he spends to grow rice on one acre of his farm in...
Thirty-seven-year-old Pradeep Singh offered a meticulous breakdown of the amount of money he spends to grow rice on one acre of his farm in Haryana’s Jhajjar district.
He pays Rs 4,500 to hire 10 daily wage workers to sow the seed, Rs 3,600 to rent a tractor, Rs 1,200 for fertiliser, Rs 300 for urea, Rs 600 for insecticide, Rs 2,800 for pesticide, Rs 400 per worker to spray the pesticide and Rs 6,000 for 10 workers to harvest the paddy.
Finally, it costs him Rs 3,500 to rent a tractor trolley to carry the crop to the market, and Rs 2,000 for diesel for the journey.
For all this work, Singh says, he makes around Rs 10,000 per acre – an additional Rs 5,000 if the harvest is good.
“The common man does not know this,” said Singh, who lives in Mahandipur village in Bahadurgarh tehsil. “Even the government will not know this [process]. Ask the agricultural minister or the prime minister…or even the Haryana chief minister. The real farmer is sitting here in front of you.”
Pradeep Singh is among the thousands of farmers from Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh who have gathered at Tikri, on the Delhi-Haryana border since November 25 to demand that the...
