By Napoleon S. Mawphniang
There’s something almost mythological about a farmer. Think about it. He is Atlas, really — carrying the entire weight of a civilization on his shoulders, bent double over red soil at five in the morning, while the rest of us sleep. He feeds the judge, the politician, the bureaucrat, the minister. And yet — and yet — when his crops come to market, nobody wants to pay him what his sweat is worth.
This is not new. It’s an ancient wound. But in Meghalaya in 2025 and 2026, that wound has been left deliberately open.
Let me begin with a number that should make every elected representative in this state sit down in uncomfortable silence. Broom grass prices in Meghalaya collapsed by over 60% in just two years — from Rs 12,188 per quintal in 2022-23 to a devastating Rs 4,685 per quintal in 2024-25. These are not my numbers. These came from Agriculture Minister Ampareen Lyngdoh herself, on the floor of our Meghalaya Legislative Assembly, on March 6, 2025. (India Today NE, “Meghalaya tackles plummeting broom prices,” March 6, 2025.)
Sixty percent. Let that settle.
If your salary was cut by 60% over two years, would you call it a minor inconvenience? Or would you call it a catastrophe? And broom grass is only one story. In Ri Bhoi and West Khasi Hills, farmer groups submitted formal memorandums as recently as February 2026, demanding Minimum Support Price coverage for areca nut and ginger — two of the state’s most significant cash crops. The response from district officials was roughly this: We’ll forward your concerns to higher authorities. (NE Frontier, “Farmers in Ri-Bhoi and West Khasi Hills Demand MSP Support,” February 26, 2026.)
Higher authorities. That phrase. Kafka would have recognized it immediately. Now, ask yourself — in the tradition of Socrates, who believed a question honestly posed is worth more than a dishonest answer — what exactly does the Meghalaya State Agricultural arketing Board do?
Check their public portal. As of last Friday, July 17, 2026 (please please check), the MSAMB website lists market prices for a handful of commodities. Banana. Cabbage. Potato. Arecanut. Broomstick. (MSAMB Portal, megamb.gov.in, July 2026.)
That’s it. That’s the entire visible infrastructure of a state agricultural marketing system serving hundreds of thousands of farming families. A webpage with six commodity prices.
Is this governance? Or is this a theatrical performance of governance?There’s a difference. Wittgenstein warned us that language can disguise thought. A “marketing board” that functions only as a data display board is not a marketing board. It’s a signboard. And signboards don’t buy your ginger when the market price collapses.
The deeper philosophical question here — and I want you to stay with me on this — is about what Paulo Freire called the culture of silence. Freire, writing about the oppressed, argued that systems of power don’t always oppress through violence. Sometimes they oppress by making the marginalized feel that their suffering is natural. Inevitable. Nobody’s fault.
When a Ri Bhoi farmer watches his ginger fetch Rs 25 per kilogram — barely covering transport costs — and nobody in Shillong calls an emergency session of the legislature, what message does that send? It sends this: your pain is ordinary. Your loss is expected. We have noted it in the register. But it isn’t ordinary. It’s a structural crime. And crimes need names. Noam Chomsky, in Manufacturing Consent, argued that institutions often manufacture the appearance of concern without the substance of action. Let’s examine the evidence with the cool detachment of a Holmesian investigator.
Exhibit A: The government announces CM-ASSURE in January 2025 — a market intervention scheme. Rs 100 crore dedicated fund. Sounds impressive. (Times of India, January 10, 2025.)
Exhibit B: The scheme covers only non-perishable crops. Ginger, turmeric, areca nut, and broom grass. What about perishables? What about that cabbage rotting in a Nongpoh truck because there’s no cold chain? What about vegetables — which, according to analysis published in The Shillong Times on March 18, 2025, Meghalaya imports 90% of, while its own farmers sell at distress prices?
Exhibit C: During February 2026, farmers in Ri Bhoi — my own district, my own farmer friends — are still submitting memorandums. Still being told to wait. Still not covered under any national MSP framework because areca nut and ginger are not in the central government’s mandated 22-crop list.
The scheme exists. The farmers still cry. Something doesn’t add up. René Girard spoke about the scapegoat mechanism — the human tendency to deflect systemic blame onto convenient victims. In Meghalaya’s agricultural politics, the scapegoat is always the market. The market fell. What can we do? But markets don’t fall on their own. They fall because governments don’t build the procurement infrastructure, cold storage chains, value-addition facilities, and export corridors that would give farmers options beyond the mercy of a middleman.
The Shillong Times itself, reporting in May 2025 on turmeric farmers, noted that prices crash post-harvest — dropping from Rs 170-180 per kilogram in lean months to Rs 70-90 per kilogram when the crop is ready. (Shillong Times, “Unstable prices, lack of markets trouble state’s turmeric farmers,” May 7, 2025.) The government-sanctioned Mawiong market near Shillong is described as “not sufficient.” Lakadong turmeric — a product of international GI-tag quality — receives the same farm-gate price as ordinary turmeric because there’s no grading system.
We have a GI tag. We don’t have a grading shed. We have a marketing board. We don’t have market power. That’s the story in a single terrible sentence.
Ambedkar once wrote that political democracy cannot succeed where social and economic democracy do not exist. I’d add to that: agricultural democracy cannot exist where price democracy is absent. A farmer who cannot negotiate the price of his own labour is not a free man. He’s a serf with a mobile phone.
And here’s the sharpest Socratic question I want to leave you with: if the government budgeted Rs 618 crore for agriculture in 2025-26 — a 43% jump from the previous year (India Today NE, March 6, 2025) — and farmers in Ri Bhoi were still marching to district offices in February 2026 demanding basic price support, where exactly did that money go?
Who asked? Who audited? Who answered?
Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, wrote that every society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. The Meghalayan farmer — isolated in the hills, without irrigation, without credit, without storage, without a guaranteed floor price — is among the most vulnerable people in India’s most naturally blessed state.
We export organic ginger to Dubai. (Shillong Times, July 15, 2025.) – but. but. but… We can’t feed our own farmers a living wage (that’s sad). That’s not irony. That’s an indictment.
I write this not as a partisan. I write this as someone from this soil, especially one who is a friend of farmers, who has watched neighbours sell their turmeric for less than the cost of the seeds that grew it. I write this because silence — the kind Freire warned about — is how systems survive their own failures.
The soil of Meghalaya is rich. Its farmers are resilient. But resilience isn’t infinite. And patience — that most abused virtue of people with low incomes — eventually runs out. The government must act. Not with another committee, not with another portal displaying six commodity prices, not with another scheme that covers twenty thousand farmers while four hundred thousand wait. It must act with real procurement. Real price floors. Real market infrastructure. Real answers.
Because the alternative is this: one morning, the farmers stop farming. And then all the ministerial budgets in the world won’t grow a single grain.
(The writer is a practising advocate and writes as a concerned citizen with no partisan affiliation).
