Apart from the wages you pay to the farm labourers, even the work done by your family members should be added to your cost. The bribes you have to pay to the government or bank officials, the cost of travelling to town for that, the cost of fighting court cases must also be added to your production cost. Joshi would also tell them about how industries fixed the prices of their products by adding up all these factors and on top of that added good percentage as their profit which was built into costing itself, because they believed that without that profit, the business just would not exist. Joshi wanted farmers also to think along those lines. Almost no farmer in those days used to calculate in that manner his production cost. For him the only cost to be considered was what he had spent on obvious items like seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, electricity, water, transport or interest on loans. Surprisingly, the Agriculture Price Commission set up by the government which fixed the prices for farm produce did not take into consideration many of these items. What Joshi taught was quite a revelation for farmers. ‘If you did not take all these factors in your accounting, you would live under the illusion that you are making good money whereas in reality you would be losing money,’ he would say. The prices fixed by Agricultural Price Commission (APC) were always way below the actual cost of production. For instance, it had considered the cost of spraying pesticides to be just Rs. 10.73 per hector. Joshi pointed out that in that amount one cannot even spray water on one hector! The cost of transporting farm produce to the Market, the cost of making bunds and fences and many such aspects were not considered by APC. The labour put in by the family members was also not considered. Joshi brought out all such defects and also suggested to them a different and more realistic method of calculating the cost so that the price fixed on that basis could be realistic. As a statistician and an economist he had suggested Synthetic Model Method for arriving at a more realistic cost. 186
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Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage
