For Babbu Malvi, a farmer from Panth Piploda village in Mandsaur district of Madhya Pradesh, the harvest season of 2025 felt like a punishment. He grew six to seven quintals of onions per bigha. He worked the soil, bought the seeds, paid for fertilisers, hired labour. And when he finally took his crop to the mandi, he was offered ₹1.99 per kilogram.
“I cannot even recover the cost of seeds and fertilisers,” he said.
Malvi is not alone. Across India, vegetable farmers — particularly onion and tomato growers — spent 2025 watching their harvests pile up while their earnings collapsed. The numbers tell a story of systematic failure. The production cost of onions was between ₹22 and ₹25 per kilogram. But average market prices ranged from only ₹8 to ₹18 per kilogram throughout 2025. In some mandis in Madhya Pradesh, wholesale prices fell as low as ₹1 to ₹2 per kilogram — leaving farmers unable to recover even basic transport and labour costs.
The gap between what a farmer earns and what a consumer pays has never felt wider. While retail prices of onions remained high in cities, farmers who grew the crop received as little as ₹1 or ₹2 per kilogram as profit. In Maharashtra, some farmers dumped their produce on highways in protest. Others quietly absorbed the loss and went into debt.
A Policy That Protected Consumers, Punished Farmers
The government’s response to rising retail prices was to release buffer stocks into the market through NAFED and NCCF — two central agencies that procure and distribute food commodities. The intention was to prevent city consumers from paying too much. The effect on farmers was the opposite.
When the government released buffer stocks into the market, it further dragged down wholesale rates, aggravating farmers’ losses. Bharat Dighole, founder president of the Maharashtra State Onion Growers Farmers’ Association, called it a “broker-protection scheme” that benefited selected middlemen rather than producers. He said the farmer was pushed into debt, many reached the brink of suicide, while the government kept projecting success through statistics.
Farmers demanded ₹1,500 per quintal in compensation, an immediate halt to buffer stock sales, and a legally guaranteed minimum support price for onions. None of it has been announced.
Tomatoes Told the Same Story
Onion farmers were not the only ones struggling. Tomato growers faced their own version of the same crisis. Farmers were forced to dump their tomato harvest — the cost of production was not even covered — while the major share of profits appeared to go to middlemen and trading companies who anticipated the price rise in monsoon months.
By July and August, when monsoon rains disrupted supply, retail tomato prices shot past ₹100 per kilogram in cities like Ranchi and Chennai. The same crop that farmers had dumped for nothing was now selling at a hundred times the price — just not in their hands.
The Structural Problem Nobody Fixes
Agricultural economists say the crisis is not a surprise — it is a pattern. When supply exceeds market absorption and the government fails to intervene with effective procurement, farmers bear the entire brunt. Cold storage is inadequate. Export policy shifts without warning. And middlemen — not farmers — capture the value at both ends of the price cycle.
India lifted a 20% onion export duty in April 2025 to counter falling prices, but the move failed to stop the week-on-week decline as bumper harvests continued flooding domestic markets.
For Babbu Malvi and thousands like him, the math of farming in India remains the same cruel equation: grow more, earn less, owe more. Until the government builds a procurement system that protects the grower — not just the consumer — vegetable farmers will keep bringing their harvests to mandis and coming home with nothing.
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