Campco urges Uttar Pradesh to remove mandi tax on arecanut trade
Farmer-owned co-operative Campco says Uttar Pradesh’s mandi tax on arecanut creates a double fiscal burden and weakens the competitiveness of organized agricultural trade.
India’s farmer-owned co-operative Campco has asked the Uttar Pradesh government to remove the mandi tax on arecanut trade or exempt co-operative institutions from it. The issue was raised during a meeting between a Campco delegation and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in Lucknow. Campco argues that the current tax regime makes legitimate trade more expensive and weakens the position of organized market participants.
Campco is a multi-state co-operative with more than 1.50 lakh farmer members. Its representatives told the state government that arecanut procured in Karnataka is already subject to APMC cess at the point of origin. When the same product enters Uttar Pradesh, it is taxed again under the mandi system, creating what the co-operative describes as a double incidence of market fees on the same produce.
According to Campco, that extra tax burden has already led to a substantial decline in turnover in Uttar Pradesh and forced the closure of its sales depot in Kanpur. The co-operative says the system raises the cost of compliant, organized trade while giving an advantage to less formal market channels. For farmer-owned institutions, that means lost revenue and weaker transparent marketing routes.
The delegation included Campco President SR Sathishchandra and Managing Director BV Sathyanarayana. They told the state government that removing the mandi tax on arecanut, or granting a specific exemption for co-operatives, would protect the interests of more than 150,000 growers while supporting legitimate business flows. In their view, the change could also improve public revenue by expanding transparent transactions rather than pushing trade into fragmented channels.
Campco is framing the issue not only as a tax dispute but also as a structural problem in inter-state agricultural trade. Once a commodity has already paid a market levy in the producing state, repeated taxation in the destination state makes planning harder for farmer institutions operating across multiple jurisdictions and reduces confidence in organized supply chains.
After the meeting, the Campco delegation said it had been assured that the Uttar Pradesh government would extend all possible support to co-operative institutions and examine the request sympathetically. For the arecanut market, the outcome will be watched as a signal of how willing Indian states are to reduce fiscal barriers facing organized farm trade and farmer co-operatives.