“It takes to the road in these interior regions much easily than the humble Alto we had earlier,” says the 20-year-old law student at the local degree college in Gonda, tapping his fingers on the freshly washed white bonnet of his family’s proud new possession.
CP Singh, one of the bigger farmers in the backward region of the Gonda-Balrampur cane belt, recently sold his old Maruti Alto and brought the Xylo as his income from cane cultivation hit a new high of Rs 14 lakh in the sugar season ended September 2010.
While most of the country — policymakers, local authorities, consumer product firms and consumers — sweats to deal with rising food prices, the cane farmers of Uttar Pradesh have gone on a spending spree to celebrate a sudden spurt in incomes.
Cane farmers in Uttar Pradesh pocketed Rs 12,100 crore at the end of the cane-crushing season this year, more than double the Rs 5,700 crore they got last year. And back of the envelope calculations show they will get close to Rs 13,500 crore in the 2010-11 season, crushing for which will start in the next few days.
So cane farmers are out spending like never before. If CP Singh has bought a vehicle, Vishnu Pratap Singh, a farmer at Kahoba village, has recently got his two sons admitted to St Monad Public School in Udham Singh Nagar, which, he points out proudly, is “near Nainital”.
Everybody is buying more
And everybody is buying more food, clothes, personal care and home care products, mobile phones, bicycles, appliances and vehicles.
“Rural customers, who earlier used to buy tractors and low-end jeeps, are now increasingly buying top-of-the-line SUVs (sports utility vehicles). Our sales in rural and semi-urban areas have been increasing by 10% more than the overall sales growth rate,” says Arun Malhotra, senior VP, sales, at utility vehicles maker Mahindra & Mahindra.