RAYA/SADABAD: Jwala Prasad is offering a never-before sale – potatoes for free. These are A-grade big potatoes that he usually sells at Rs 11 per kg. Had you been five days early, he said, you would have got cauliflower and brinjals too – for free.So what’s the catch? Sadly for Prasad, the offer is as unconditional as it is tragic.Like many other farmers here, in the potato belt of Uttar Pradesh that starts near Mathura, about 150 km from Delhi , Prasad has little choice. He can either abandon his crop at cold storages or plough it into the ground as cash appears to have vanished from the market ever since the government on November 8 announced withdrawal of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes as legal tender, rendering invalid 86% of India’s currency.A rich crop of potatoes is dumped along the roadside and sacks of potatoes abandoned outside cold storages in the potato belt as farmers are not finding buyers in the mandis.Even if there are some buyers, the rates have crashed, making it uneconomical for the farmers to pay transportation costs and take potatoes to the mandis.Kunwar Raghavendra Singh, former zila panchayat member in Raya , said the farmer is getting a rate of Re 1 per kg.Every year, farmers sow potatoes between October 20 and 30. When the new crop is ready around January end, they sell roughly 20% of the produce in February and the rest is sent to cold storages to be released slowly when the rates get higher.The rates average around Rs 600-800 per katta (a bag of 52 kg). The farmer pays Rs 100 to the cold storage owner for storing his crop. So he gets Rs 11-15 per kg. Prasad, a resident of Sesu Nangla village in Raya, had kept 132 bags in Mansarovar cold storage on Mathura-Aligarh road. “I am getting no rate right now. For my potatoes I was getting Rs 8 per kg before ‘notebandi’.But now it is useless. I have to pay Rs 105 per bag to the cold storage person and then add to it transportation costs. What I would get is just Re 1 per kg in a mandi,” he said.So Prasad is now selling potatoes to gowshalas. He is getting a measly Rs 50 per bag of 52 kg. “Rest I will distribute for free in the village,” he said.Just like Prasad, Nekram of Nagla Amrua village had kept 515 bags of potatoes in Brijwasi cold storage at Raya on Mathura-Aligarh road. He hasn’t gone back to claim them. “I would have to pay the cold storage person for something I cannot sell.What is the point?” he said. The potato belt supplies to big markets in Jaipur Mumbai , Delhi, Gurgaon Kanpur and Lucknow . With the markets running out of cash, the potatoes are useless.In Sadabad on Mathura-Aligarh road, cold storages have been saddled with thousands of unclaimed potato bags. Pradeep Kumar Singh , owner of Om Sheetgrah , said, “I have about 5,000 potato bags lying unclaimed. These are farmers who owe me money from before. But what do I do? Everybody is in distress.”The cold storages are shut down mid-November for annual maintenance. Singh ran his facility for an extra month so that he could help the farmers already in distress due to demonetisation But now he has had to dump all the bags outside the cold storage. “We have dug up a huge pit on the cold storage grounds to dump the produce,” he said.Just a few kilometres from Singh’s cold storage in Khandauli block, farmers have been ploughing their produce in the ground. “What do we do? We carry these potatoes and vegetables to the market to find no buyers.Even transporting and loading them needs labourers. It is additional cost. We use what we can,” said Moni Singh of Kharwa village. His neighbour let his cattle out to graze on the dumped vegetables and then ploughed the remaining into the field. “What else? They are useless,” he said.Prominent farmer leader and Bharatiya Kisan Sangharsh Samiti national president Pushpendra Chaudhary said, “The potato farmers have been ruined for the next two years. The markets would not recover even for the sale of rabi crop. The Modi government should at least write off loans of farmers.”