CITES ICRIER RESEARCH SHOWING THAT 2023’S EXPORT BANS AND STOCKING CURBS ALONE COST INDIAN FARMERS NEARLY ₹40,000 CRORE IN A SINGLE YEAR.
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Reacting to the Central Government’s notification of 24 August 2026 lifting the export ban on wheat, wheat flour, maida, semolina and related products, Shri KBS Sidhu, retired IAS officer and former Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab, said this was yet another instance of a pattern that has become routine in India’s agricultural trade policy: decisions on the export or import of major farm commodities are taken by the Government of India, often in the bona fide interest of consumers or downstream industry, without the farmer ever being present at the negotiating table.
“These restrictions, and their reversals, are announced and withdrawn entirely at the government’s discretion. The farmer has no seat when the decision is made, no notice before it is made, and no share in accounting for what it costs him. And despite the regulatory language used, ‘Free’ is not free in the economic sense. It is the farmer who pays the price,” KBS Sidhu said.
He pointed out that the pattern is not confined to wheat. “We saw it earlier this year with the duty-free import window opened for cotton, timed just as Punjab’s crop was reaching the mandis. We are seeing it again with sugar, where the government swung from permitting exports in November 2025 to an outright export ban in May 2026 to a duty-free import quota in August, all within a single season, without the cane grower’s price moving an inch through any of it,” he added.
KBS Sidhu cited existing academic work quantifying the scale of this cost. “This concern is not new. Dr. Ashok Gulati, former Chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), and his co-authors at ICRIER estimated that the restrictive trade measures imposed in 2023 alone — the ban on non-basmati white rice exports, stocking limits on wheat, and export curbs on onion and parboiled rice — cost Indian farmers close to ₹39,829 crore in that single year. Earlier OECD-ICRIER research, with which Dr. Gulati has long been associated, had placed the average annual implicit taxation of Indian farmers through such restrictive trade and marketing policies at roughly ₹2.65 lakh crore a year over 2000-01 to 2016-17, a cumulative ₹45 lakh crore. These are not small, notional numbers. They are documented, repeated findings, going back more than two decades,” KBS Sidhu said.
KBS Sidhu called for an institutional mechanism to close the resulting gap. “What is missing is not the evidence. What is missing is a formal mechanism, built into how these decisions are made, that estimates the likely impact on farm incomes before or immediately after such a notification is issued, and that considers how some part of the benefit, to the consumer, to industry, to the exchequer, is apportioned back to the farmer whose price signal was suppressed in the first place. No Finance Bill passes without a memorandum on its revenue implications. No DGFT notification carries anything comparable for the farmer,” he said.
He further observed that this structural gap has gone largely unaddressed in public discourse. “What is striking, given the scale of the numbers involved, is that no political party, no farmer organisation, and no economic institution or think tank has adequately underscored this as a standing structural issue, rather than treating each commodity’s grievance as a separate, unconnected episode,” KBS Sidhu said.
