Sugarcane farmers in West Champaran have not been paid for years by the sugar factory in the district or the one across the border in Nepal. Thanks to indifferent authorities, they have no one to turn t
| Anand ST Das Valmikinagar (West Champaran) |
Lalchand Sarkar is distraught. He had to call off his daughter’s wedding at the last minute as he didn’t have enough money. “The wedding plans have been dropped. I have to wait for my cane payment for god knows how many more years,” lamented the 52-year-old farmer who owns five acres of farmland in Bhedihanri, a village settled by refugees from Bangladesh, situated close to the Indo-Nepal border in Bihar’s West Champaran district. Together, the Tirupati Sugar Mills Ltd — the only sugar factory in West Champaran — and the Bagmati Khandsari Sugar Factory Pvt Ltd in Kudiya, across the border in Nepal’s Nawalparasi district, owe Sarkar Rs 75,000.
In the last ten odd years, thousands of sugarcane growers in West Champaran have supplied their produce to the Bagmati Khandsari sugar factory. Sugarcane has been smuggled across the border to Nepal from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh since the 1970s. Sugarcane growers in West Champaran seem unaware that selling sugarcane across the border in Nepal is illegal. And most of them have similar stories of payments long overdue.
Sugarcane smuggling in West Champaran violates laws barring the sale of Indian raw materials in the international market and costs India several crores annually in the form of lost cane cess, excise duty on sugar and molasses, and the local development funds for cane-growing areas paid by sugar mills.
It was the Bihar government’s callous handling of relations between the West Champaran cane growers and the Tirupati Sugar Mills Ltd forced the cane growers to sell their produce in Nepal in the first place. More than the farmers, it is the factory owners, the police, the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) personnel guarding the Indo-Nepal border, district administration officials and the Bihar Sugarcane Development Department officials who have benefited from the clandestine trade in sugarcane. The smuggling continues despite the presence of SSB guards along the “soft border”.
Sugar factories in Nepal located close to the border have been sourcing cane from across the border because of low cane production in Nepal’s hilly terai areas. While a majority of West Champaran’s farmers have not been paid in full or not paid at all by factory at Kudiya in Nepal, located six kilometres from Valmikinagar, the owners of the Bagmati Khandsari Sugar Factory, the cane-supply agents appointed by it, West Champaran administration officials and, to some extent, SSB personnel — all have benefited from the smuggling.
The SSB functions under the Union home ministry which woke up to the fact of the smuggling only recently. In the first week of March, the ministry sent circulars to the SSB asking it to “stop smuggling of sugarcane from India for use in Nepalese factories.” After the circular was issued, the SSB stepped up its vigil on the borders but the sudden denial of passage to Indian cane growers accustomed to years of unrestricted smuggling into Nepal led to agitations and demonstrations, in which a West Champaran district administration executive magistrate was gravely injured.
Thousands of cane farmers demonstrated at the international border at the Gandak Barrage in Valmikinagar (in West Champaran) in March demanding permission to carry tractor-loads of sugarcane to Bagmati in Nepal.
The SSB and the West Champaran district administration blame each other for the smuggling, and the cane growers blame the Bihar government and the Tirupati Sugar Mills Ltd. Located at Bagaha in West Champaran district, the factory owes the area’s cane growers about Rs 14 crore. Half that amount is due from the current season’s produce; the other half has been pending since the 1998-99 season.
THE SHAHS |
| Shankar Shah, his wife Chandana Rani and father Ashutosh Shah (extreme right), with the sugarcane supply receipts issued to them by the Bagmati Khandsari Sugar Mills Pvt Ltd situated in Kudia in Nepal. Shah says that the factory owner, Rohit Shrestha, pointed his revolver at him when he met him at his factory in January 2007 and asked for his pending dues. “He took many of my receipts and tore them in front of me. He then asked me to run if I wanted to live. I have no money to treat my serious eye injury. My children cannot study, and I cannot provide any medical care to my aging father,” Shankar told Tehelka at his home at Bhedihanri village near Valmikinagar. |
The factory, owned by Kolkata-based industrialist Manoj Poddar, has been so erratic in the payment of dues owed to the cane growers over the past decade that most of them have been forced to smuggle their produce to the factory across the border in Nepal hoping for early and high payments. The crushing capacity of the Tirupati Sugar Mills Ltd is a low 25,000 quintals per day and farmers are obliged to carry their cane to the Nepali factory to avoid the drying and wastage of their sugarcane.
“We cane growers are like the state government and the sugar factory’s bonded labourers. Because our farms fall in the reserved area of the factory at Bagaha, we are prevented from supplying our produce to other factories in Bihar, which make timely and better payment. The Bihar Sugarcane (Regulation of Supply and Purchase) Act, 1981, is a draconian law modelled on the laws in force during the British era. It has forced us to indulge in smuggling,” said Mohammad Issa, a cane grower at Paras Nagar village in Bagaha, who is owed Rs 22,000 by the Bagmati factory in Nepal and Rs 40,000 by Tirupati Sugar Mills in Bagaha.
There have been frequent demands by cane growers’ associations for the abolition of the act so that farmers no longer have to depend on the whims of a single factory. “This act is similar to the British laws governing indigo cultivation in this area decades ago. While the Bihar government has never cared to implement the pro-farmer provisions and spirit of this act, factory owners have colluded with cane development authorities to violate the act’s provisions and keep thousands of poor farmers perennially in distress,” Raj Kaushal Mishra, a Valmikinagar-based cane grower and general secretary of the Bihar Kisan Sangh told Tehelka. “With the sugar factory still cheating farmers and the laws preventing farmers from taking their produce to factories of their choice, fewer and fewer farmers will opt for sugarcane farming in the coming years.”
Apart from the Tirupati Sugar Mill’s erratic payment schedules, what makes farmers in West Champaran opt for the Bagmati sugar factory are the incentives it provides them. These include pre-season advance amounts, higher cane prices and transport facilities. Sources in the SSB said that over 40 of Bagmati Sugar Factory’s tractor-trolleys are in operation in Valmikinagar to carry the cane across the border. The factory’s owner, Rohit Shrestha, has been “blacklisted” by the Nepal government for tax related irregularities. He couldn’t be contacted despite repeated attempts by Tehelka.
THE SAHNIS |
| Laxman Sahni of village Paras Nagar in Bagaha, West Champaran district, displays sugarcane supply receipts issued to him year after year by Tirupati Sugar Mills Ltd. in Bagaha. Sahni supplied sugarcane worth Rs 30,000 to the factory this season alone. He has yet to receive any payment. “I have encashed many of my older factory receipts from rich people at 40 percent cuts because I needed the money badly to grow sugarcane on my six acres of farmland and to send my children to school,” Laxman told Tehelka. Sahni’s farmlands lie across the Gandak river and are accessible only by boat. |
Another reason behind sugarcane smuggling is that large tracts of cane-growing areas, lying in the Gandak river’s sprawling diara — large tracts of land which are surrounded by water — are not claimed as reserved areas by sugar factories either in Bihar or in UP. This is because of the unclear demarcation of inter-state borders and the absence of revenue villages in the diara lands along the Gandak. Measuring as much as 35 km across at several places, the Gandak’s diara lands have a bountiful harvest of cane.
Before the SSB was deployed along the Indo-Nepal border four years ago, there was no hindrance to taking sugarcane to Nepal. With Kudiya just six kilometres from Valmikinagar, it has always been much easier for growers to take their produce there than to Bagaha, which is 45 km away and accessible only through a potholed, rundown road which passes through dense forest.
Compounding the cane-growers’ woes are the nearly 2,000 independent cane crushers operating in the Tirupati Sugar Mill’s reserved area. Most of these crushers are illegal and they give loans to needy farmers during the growing season. When the cane is ready, they forcibly seize it, often at half the price offered by the sugar factories. “Truckloads of treacle and molasses produced by the crushers are smuggled into Bangladesh via Nepal through the Indo-Nepal border, giving the crusher owners a good profit. SSB personnel get handsome bribes in the bargain,” local farmers said.
The SSB denies there is any sugarcane smuggling. “Before the SSB’s deployment, smuggling was rampant. These days it’s stopped altogether, which is why the farmers had to demonstrate [in arch]. There are certain elements on both sides of the border who want the smuggling to continue and these people instigated the farmers to demonstrate,” SSB’s 12th Battalion Commandant HR Barot told Tehelka.
When contacted, Bihar sugarcane development minister Nitish Mishra said that that the government had not received any reports of smuggling. “We’re trying our best to improve the farmers’ conditions. Legal action is being taken against the Bagaha sugar factory for cheating farmers. Many of the cane growers’ problems will be solved once our proposed sugar factories are set up,” Mishra said.
VK Tulsyan, vice-president of Tirupati Sugar Mill Ltd, told Tehelka: “We will clear the dues owed to the farmers and the workers once a suitable package is announced by the Bihar government. We’re also planning capacity expansion in the near future, depending on how conducive the environment is.” Forty-two cases were registered against Tirupati Sugar Mill by the West Champaran District Magistrate Mihir Kumar in February for habitual non- payment of dues to cane growers and mill workers. The total money owed adds up to Rs 13 crore. The cases are currently pending in the Patna High Court.
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