Small and marginal farmers form the bigger chunk of grain oil seed and cotton producers in rural area in Maharashtra. Social inclusion is a key concept indicative of partnership of small marginal farmers in gains of technological progress and growth in agricultural sector. If the small and marginal farmers are squeezed by the rural marketing system they will be excluded from gains. Present rural marketing in Maharashtra is controlled by Agricultural Marketing Produce Committees (APMC) which is highly politicized and it is battle field of rural party politics. The buying of agricultural produce is in the hands of business class who use the cobweb theory and monopsonic tactics of cartelizing whole buying process at the time of harvesting grains cotton and soya bean crop. The floor support price of buying taken over by Co-op Marketing Federation is most of the times lower than the actual cost of sowing and harvesting. The monopsony is a condition of market filled with large number of small capacity sellers and only one big buyer (co-op sugar factory or a big consigner sitting in APMC limits). ‘Monopsony’ is a recent term the credit of which has been given to Mrs. Joan Robinson of Cambridge who coined and used the term in her Classic book Economics of Imperfect Competition (1932) Mrs. Robinson had recognized that the use of term ‘monopsony’ was illogical since it meant both single buyer-seller. Mrs. Robinson explained that she needed a word for situation where sole big buyer can exploit many small sellers (farmers). Social exclusion is occurring on a large scale in rural Maharashtra and there is urgent need to replace social exclusion by Social Inclusion in order to give full stop to farmers’ suicides which are the result of Social exclusion. A debtor, a bank defaulter, a mortgager is a socially excluded person in rural Maharashtra mostly ruined by exploitative-monopsonic buying of agricultural farm produce at each successive harvesting by lowering purchase price until it goes below the cost of cultivation.
Monopsony, Cartel, Social Inclusion, Social Exclusion, Rural Marketing Social Inclusion
