Wheat has a calendar, and this week it turned. In Punjab’s rain-fed belt, the agriculture department advised farmers on Monday to begin sowing from October 15. In lower Sindh, where the season runs ahead, the first drills will move within days. Across the irrigated plains of Punjab the land is being ploughed and levelled, the rauni water is going onto the fields, and in the first half of November the drills will follow. Every acre now being prepared is being prepared on the strength of a number that does not exist.
On September 30, the Government of India did something unremarkable. The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the minimum support prices for the rabi crops of the 2027-28 marketing season. Wheat was fixed at INR 2,610 per quintal, an increase of 25 rupees, the smallest hike in seventeen years. Indian farmer unions called it a deception. Their economists called it a signal to diversify into pulses and oilseeds. The argument across the border is about whether 25 rupees is an insult or a strategy.
It is, at least, an argument about a number.
The Indian announcement deserves a closer look, not for its generosity, which its own farmers dispute, but for its plumbing. The price came from a standing institution, the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, working to a published formula: since 2018, at least one and a half times the weighted average cost of production. It was approved by cabinet before sowing, as it is every year, and it is backed by a procurement machine preparing to buy some 32 million tonnes of wheat this season.
Now look at the ledger underneath that price, because this is the part our debate never examines. One Indian rupee is worth about 3 Pakistani rupees; the comparisons that follow are converted. The Indian farmer buys his urea at the equivalent of Rs705 a bag; ours pays Rs4,780. He buys DAP at the equivalent of Rs3,940, held down by subsidy while global prices ran several times higher; ours is paying Rs18,000 in the market this month, up from Rs14,000 a year ago. His diesel costs the equivalent of Rs277 a litre; ours costs close to Rs400, of which Rs100 is tax. His tubewell in Punjab runs on free power, carried on the state budget at 7,715 crore Indian rupees this year; ours runs on the diesel just described. And the advantages compound: on land that was one irrigation system a century ago, Indian Punjab harvests about 52 maunds of wheat an acre against our official 33.
None of this is free. India’s fertiliser subsidy is budgeted in the lakh crores; the provision for phosphatic and potassic fertilisers alone, for just the six months to September, is 41,500 crore INR. It sits on a procurement mountain, and it is depleting its groundwater to keep it. We should not copy the mountain. But we must notice what it buys: certainty, and a farmer whose costs the state chose to absorb rather than transmit.
Here is the comparison that should end the argument. Convert that Indian price at today’s exchange rate and it comes to roughly Rs3,050 per forty kilograms in our money. That figure should be familiar. It sits inside the range our farmers were forced to accept this April, when distress sales ran from Rs2,900 to Rs3,200 against the government’s own benchmark of Rs3,500. The price India announces before sowing sits inside the distress-sale range Pakistan’s farmers endured after harvest. Their floor is our ceiling.
Meanwhile, our fortnight. A parliamentary committee recommended Rs5,000 per forty kilograms and a National Wheat Policy before sowing; the minister promised consultations within a week. The Federal Committee on Agriculture adjourned without fixing rabi targets, because nobody could tell it what wheat is worth. The Punjab Agriculture Department told barani farmers to begin sowing on October 15, and could tell them the seed seed availabity but not the price nor quantity available. And on October 13, the Prime Minister chaired the first meeting of the National Agriculture and Food Security Council and announced that the price would be announced, after consultations, before sowing. No number, no date, no mechanism.
That same day, the Deputy Prime Minister chaired the seventh meeting of the Steering Committee on Wheat Imports and expressed satisfaction that the first foreign shipment will reach Karachi before the end of this month. Read the two together. A steering committee that has met seven times, with contracted tonnage, settled prices and shipping schedules, exists to buy wheat from abroad. A council meeting for the first time, producing a promise, is what exists for the man now ploughing his field.
The Trading Corporation knows its price to the cent: 349 dollars a tonne. The miller has his release price, the importer his tender, the bank its committee. The only participant without a number is the one who will sow the wheat crop. Grain arriving in October does not compete with a harvest due in April; what competes is certainty itself. The state has written a price, a financing arrangement and a shipping schedule for foreign wheat, while the man planting the domestic crop does not know what his own harvest might fetch. Expectations are also a crop, and they are being planted now.
It will be said that consultations take time, that provinces must be heard, that a wrong price is worse than a late one. None of this survives contact with the calendar. Wheat is sown in a window, and the window’s costs are paid before it opens. The seed and fertiliser are being bought now, the acreage is being decided now, the rauni is running now. A fair price announced after the seed is in the ground is not policy. It is history. The farmer who needed the number in October will read it in November the way he reads last year’s weather: with interest, and no use for it.
The remedy is not simple, and I have documented why in my earlier write ups. A price without a buyer is a slogan; a buyer without finance is April again. What sowing requires is a framework, not a rumour: a pre-sowing price announced on a fixed date every year; an honest label saying whether it is indicative or a support price; and if it is support, a funded mechanism behind it, a named buyer, bank credit lines against the crop, storage that can hold what is bought, and a seasonal bridge so that the loan falling due in April does not dictate the sale in April. And since no price can outrun the input ledger, the taxes that took diesel to Rs400 and DAP to Rs18,000 belong in the same consultation that is now deciding what the farmer deserves.
The farmer in Indian Punjab will complain about his 25 rupees all winter, and he may be right to. But he will go to his field next month carrying a price, a formula, a date, and a procurement network that will actually open its gates to him. The farmer in Pakistani Punjab goes carrying a promise. He was promised a market in 2024 and got a glut. He was promised receipts in 2025 and got paper. He was promised aggregators in 2026 and sold at Rs2,900 while the state negotiated in May.
A farmer can plan around a disappointing price. He cannot plan around a promise that arrives after he has spent the money. The ships are moving. The rauni is running. The drills start in days. Only the number is standing still
Mohsin leghari is a wonderful writer and an expert on irrigation as well as agriculture. State should seek his expertise for the benefit of the country.