A farmer from Abohar - Fazilka region of Punjab has the following to say..
I have been actively farming for 2 decades now & I have witnessed many things happening at the APMC’s..I have seen classification of C grade grain miraculously change into B grade..
Similarly I have also
witnessed the weigh bridge weigh in the empty truck at 39 tons and the full truck at 55 tons and later found that the unloaded truck weighed 43 tons at another weigh bridge.
There are over 30,000 registered arthiyas in Punjab.
These 30,000 employ another 3,00,000 sub agents or
sidekicks or people who wouldn’t have made it into doing anything anyplace were it not for the patronage network of these 30,000. There are only 1500 farming villages in Punjab.
So 3,30,000 divided by1500 is about 220 people on average per village doing the work of middlemen.
Why is this the case? It’s a long story and high time people are made aware.
We had a food shortage & a hand to mouth existence until the 1970’s.
Norman Borlaugh pioneered a variety of wheat which gave 10 X the yield but needed 3X the fertiliser.
The Punjab was chosen as the battleground against hunger. Enterprising Sikh farmers worked hard to create what we know as the Green Revolution.
Since there were huge shortages, laws were made which didn’t allow for stockholding or selling at farm gates.