While onion is a lot in the news now — thanks to retail prices hovering at Rs 60/kg — the other key staple vegetable, potato, has disappeared from public imagination. This, even as a production glut has forced farmers of this starchy tuber to dump their crop on roadsides or nullahs.

Last month, farmers in Jalandhar even distributed some 500 quintals of potato free to consumers to highlight their plight. But the government just isn’t listening, they allege — a contrast to onions where the consumer’s voice cannot be ignored.

Potatoes are selling in the Jalandhar market at below Rs 200 per quintal, as against Rs 1,350-1,400 at this time last year. Worse, out of Punjab’s 22 lakh tonnes (lt) crop harvested during December-March, 18-19 lt is still lying in the state’s 500-odd cold stores.

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Punjab accounts for barely 5 per cent of India’s potato output. But it supplies 11-12 lt or 55-60 per cent of potatoes that farmers in other producing states such as Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka use as ‘seed’. Only 30 per cent of the crop grown in nearly 90,000 hectares in Punjab is used as table potatoes for direct consumption. The rest is all seed potatoes, with 20 per cent consumed in Punjab and the major 50 per cent share being transported to other states. Jalandhar is home to the likes of Sangha Farms, Bhatti Agritech and JS Farms, whose seed potatoes are popular among growers across the country.

India’s potato production in 2014-15 was estimated at 448.93 lt, up from the previous year’s 415.55 lt. The output increase led to a countrywide crash in wholesale prices, the impact of which is being felt by Punjab’s seed potato growers. “When potato prices fall, farmers stop taking our seeds. They prefer using their own unsold crop as seed, though this isn’t of good quality and can result in lower production next year,” notes Ramanjit Singh Sikki, Congress MLA, who grows seed potatoes on 3,000-4000 acres.

Potatoes are mostly propagated by vegetative methods; the ‘seeds’ that growers use are the tubers, having nodes or ‘eyes’ from which the stems (sprouts) grow into new plants. The seed potatoes can be either whole or cut tubers.

“We use 50-60 quintals of full potato seeds per hectare to maintain quality. In other states, only 7-8 quintals are sown and, that too, not as full tubers but by cutting into half,” explains Raghbir Singh, president of Jalandhar Potato Growers Association (JPGA) and owner of Giani Seed Farm.

Seed potatoes fetch higher prices than normal table potatoes. According to Singh, when prices of table potatoes were Rs 800 per quintal during the harvest season in 2014, branded seed producers realised Rs 1,400-1,500, with even non-branded material selling at Rs 1,200-1,300/quintal. But this year, Jalandhar’s seed potato producers are being forced to sell at Rs 900 per quintal. “This time is when we should be getting huge orders ahead of the sowing season, but there is hardly any demand,” he says.

Jaswinder Singh Sangha, general secretary of JPGA, blames both the Centre and the Punjab government for the crisis. The Centre, in June 2014, imposed a minimum export price of $450 per tonne on potato shipments. There was good export demand for Indian potatoes then, with around 4,000 trucks going to Pakistan alone. The Centre’s move was in response to rising domestic prices.

The export restrictions were removed only after mid-February this year, by which time prices had crashed on the back of a bumper harvest. Sangha believes large quantities could have got exported during the harvesting period from December 2014 to February 2015: “Our potato has great demand in the Middle East. Three years back, we even exported 20,000 tonnes to Russia”.

When producers are suffering, even the state government isn’t ready to help, complains Sangha. “The Punjab government could at least have announced a Re 1/kg freight subsidy on potato transportation to other states, given the extent of glut and unsold stocks lying in cold stores,” he adds.

Potato producers believe that increased cold storage capacity — the numbers of such stores have gone up fivefold to around 500 in Punjab over the past two decades — hasn’t really solved the problem of glut.

“We have to, after all, pay store owners to keep our potatoes. And with the low prices today, we can’t recover even the cost of storage, forget cultivation expenses,” points out Satnam Singh, a 50-acre farmer from Kangniwal village near Jalandhar, who grows table potatoes on 30 acres.