Kishan Kaka Yadav shrugs his shoulders, put his safety gear on, and steps into a building. Memories from 30 years ago come rushing back as he enters the defunct sugarcane factory which had its first run in 1979. His eyes light up when he sees the central unit, which comprised clanking baskets that once moved at high speed to turn molasses into sugar crystals. “There was no sight better than that of millions of tiny shining crystals tumbling out of here,” he reminisces.
At its peak, the Kada Sahkari Sakhar Karkhana (KSSK), in the drought-hit Ashti taluka of Beed district, produced 3,03,169 tonnes of sugar in 1981-82. From then on, it kept falling, to touch 3,000 tonnes on the last day of production in 2014. The factory shut down because of falling production and rising debts.
The KSSK was taken over from Bhimrao Dhonde, BJP legislator from Ashti, by cooperative banks of Aurangabad and was later attached by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation on November 11, 2015, for non-payment of arrears.
Nearly 10 sugar factories in Marathwada, of them five in Beed district, have shut down due to bad debts and falling production in the wake of poor monsoon. Of the 76 factories across Maharashtra, 30 have shut shop while production has crashed from about 20 lakh tonnes a couple of years ago to just 3.5 lakh tonnes last year. The debate around sugarcane rages on in Marathwada, more fiercely now with the State government’s decision to ban licensing of new factories.
“This is a welcome move by the government. This crop is not in the interest of farmers in Marathwada even though they have made a good living out of it. I believe that this drought in Marathwada is man-made and sugarcane alone has played a 70-per cent part,” India’s waterman and Ramon Magsaysay award winner Rajendra Singh told The Hindu .
Sugarcane continues to divide the academic discourse as well. Agriculture experts and agro-scientists who blame sugarcane for the current water crisis in Marathwada claim the cash crop guzzles up to three crore litres an acre of water annually. Those in favour, peg this number at 1.5 crore litres with the flow irrigation technique and nearly half of that with micro irrigation methods. Those criticising claim soyabean and chickpea only uses less than 50 lakh litres.
“I want to ask those who are against sugarcane as to what is the scientific source of their information. A picture is being painted that growing sugarcane is a crime, without appreciating that lives of hundreds of farmers have improved over the years,” said B.B. Thombare, chairman of Natural Sugar and Allied Limited at Osmanabad. Having carried out an experiment on a 50-acre plot in Latur between 2007-2008, the mill managed a yield of 110 tonnes of cane an acre with just 7 ft furrow and water utilisation of 1.5 crore litres on an average annually. Unperturbed by the criticism of cane, the farmer in the water-sufficient areas around canals and river basins here still swears by the reliability and dependability of the crop, while those in the parched interiors who have already suffered one or more crop loss sound a note of caution. “With enough water from the Godavari basin, my cane yield touched 40 tonnes per acre last year. So far, I haven’t felt the need for installing drip irrigation,” says Sadashiv Ramesh of Georai taluka in Beed. There are those who criticise the “preferential” treatment sugarcane has received from the government over the years.
“The flow and sources of water in Marathwada were all tamed and manipulated for the benefit of the powerful sugar lobby over the years,” says Tukaram Yelale, producer and exporter of fruits and grapes and chairman of Krishi Vikas Export, Latur.