Among my many childhood friends, one was Vijay Dalmia. We studied together till class X. After passing class X, I moved to Lucknow for higher education, while he stayed back in our hometown and completed class XII from the lone Intermediate college there till that time. After completing my masters and before I got my first job, I stayed in my hometown for about two-and-a-half years.

One fine summer morning I stumbled on Vijay outside the wheat purchase centre set up by the Government. As we were meeting after a gap of seven or eight years, we talked about what each of us was doing. I was a job seeker and Vijay in business of grains purchase and sale. This was no surprise for me as his family was already running a unit for grinding wheat and extracting rice and oil from mustard, a shop for selling fertilisers and pesticides and a shop for selling kerosene. He purchased wheat from the farmers and sold them to the government purchase centre for profit. His hold was so tight over the purchase centre that the centre would just refuse to purchase grains from the farmers on flimsy grounds. Then Vijay will purchase the same grains and sell them to the purchase centre.

Ever since then I am not in touch with Vijay. But interaction with farmers, their producer groups, organisations working with them, media reports, etc., lead me believe that at present hundreds of thousands of people are doing business like Vijay. These people are called ‘middlemen’ or ‘broker’ or ‘bichauliya’ and are much hated entity. And yes, the farmers still bound to sell the grains to the district’s market, run by Agriculture Produce Market Committee till the new provisions were passed recently.

While the agriculture bills passed by Parliament permit the farmer to sell his produce to anyone anywhere, the farmers were earlier too not bound to sell grains to APMC run market; they could sell grains to any other trader, or even the end user. One farmer in Saharanpur district in Uttar Pradesh, Rahtu Lal says till four-five years ago, he used to sell wheat and rice in Yamuna Nagar district of Haryana, because he used to get better price there. But since then he is not able to do so, because of market dynamics and opposition of farmers there.

Alok Mishra, a farmer, who also works in the Revenue Department of Uttar Pradesh Government in a district, says we have seen the provision of APMC and now we will see new provisions also. He was sceptical if the new provisions would be beneficial to farmers. All that the farmers want is sufficient price of their produce, which fluctuates a lot according to the quantity of produce, he says.

An activist working with farmers, Raja Bhaiya, said it was immaterial who was the trader, and summarised the situation in the shape of a couplet of Bundelkhand na khaata naa bahi, baniya hamesha sahi (no books, trader is always right). For every quintal wheat brought to the trader, 5-7 kg goes as unloading, sieving and storage charges and the farmer returns home with the remaining trader decided money, unless he is able to sell product to APMC run market directly.

To put it simply instead of addressing the most pressing problem of minimum guaranteed price for the produce, the new provisions seek to shift the trade to new breed of Vijayas, by making old Vijayas redundant. This new breed of Vijayas has very deep pockets. They are acquiring, no that’s a mild word, the correct word will be usurping, hundreds or thousands of acres of land, mostly farmland, to set up warehouses. And yet they claim to be in the service of Food Corporation of India.