Cabinet approves 50% profit over input cost for rabi crops
New Delhi, Oct 3 : With Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh round the corner, the Centre on Wednesday announced a steep increase in the MSP for winter-sown crops, including Rs 1,840 per quintal for wheat and Rs 4,620 for gram.
The Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for notified Rabi crops for 2018-19, which would give additional returns of Rs 62,635 crore to farmers.
Compared with the MSP announced last year, the assured prices for this rabi season has been increased by Rs 105 per quintal for wheat, Rs 845 for safflower, Rs 200 for rapeseed and mustard, Rs 30 for barley, Rs 225 for masur and Rs 220 for gram.
Addressing a press conference here, Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh said that the MSP for wheat would provide 112.5 per cent profit over its production cost of Rs 866 per quintal.
For barley, the MSP is Rs 1,440 per quintal as against the production cost of Rs 860 per quintal, which gives a return of 67.4 per cent, he added.
For gram, the cost of production is Rs 2,637 per quintal whereas the new MSP is Rs 4,620 per quintal, giving a profit of 75.2 per cent.
The MSP for masur will be Rs 4,475 per quintal as against the production cost of Rs 2,532 per quintal, a profit of 76.7 per cent.
For rapeseed and mustard, the MSP is Rs 4,200 per quintal as against the production cost of Rs 2,212, a return of 89.9 per cent.
For safflower, the cost of production is Rs 3,294 per quintal whereas the MSP is Rs 4,945 per quintal, ensuring a profit of 50.1 per cent.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
