PRIME Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP had generated high hopes and got the support of farmers in 2014 elections by promising the implementation of the Swaminathan commission recommendation of fixing MSP according to the formula C2+50 percent. It has betrayed them yet again by announcing MSP for the Kharif crops based on A2+FL costs instead of the promised more comprehensive C2 costs. Also no steps have been taken to ensure assured procurement. Without assured procurement any such announcement is only notional and will not accrue to the cultivating peasantry.

THE central working committee of AIAWU met at Nasik (Maharashtra) on June 19-20. 32 comrades attended the meeting from Kerala, Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana. The general secretary’s report had noted that the all-round attack on the rural cash economy, the hard hit farming sector, unemployment and the loss of jobs in agriculture, in construction as well as in small-scale rural businesses, is hurting the mass of the rural people and driving them to ruin and starvation.

A MEETING of the central office bearers of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) held on June 26 in New Delhi decided to support the idea of a long march of the dispossessed to Delhi to demand a special session of parliament called entirely to discuss the serious agrarian crisis in the country.This unprecedented agrarian crisis is reflected in the lakhs of suicides of debt-ridden peasants; the thousands of deaths of children and women due to starvation and malnutrition; the abysmal state of rural education and public health; the massive increase in rural unemployment and landlessness; and the un

MASSIVE struggles by the All India Kisan Sabha in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and elsewhere were preceded by a build up of independent and united struggles in the past four years. The recent successes of Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Karnataka peasantry have generated an electrifying impact on the peasantry and all democratic sections with the Maharashtra Kisan Long March undoubtedly catching the imagination of the peasantry and people.

Below we publish the agreement reached between the government of Maharashtra and the Maharashtra Rajya Kisan Sabha on March 12, 2018 in the talks held with the chief minister at the conclusion of the long march. This agreement was tabled in the state assembly by the chief minister on March 13, 2018.