Veteran farmers’ leader and Shetkari Sanghatana founder Sharad Joshi, who led scores of mass-agitations across the country on peasant issues and crusaded all along for securing remunerative prices for agriculturists, died in Pune on Saturday, following prolonged illness.
Joshi, who had been discharged from a Pune hospital early this month, breathed his last his Pune residence. He was 80 and is survived by a son and daughter.
A well-read bureaucrat-turned farmers’ leader, Joshi was a Rajya Sabha member from 2004 to 2010. Such was the nature of his role as an MP that he served on as many as 16 parliamentary committees. He created a stir in the Rajya Sabha in 2005 when he moved a private member bill, seeking the deletion of the word socialism from the Representation of the People Act of the Constitution of India.
Born in Satara district of Western Maharashtra on September 3, 1935, Joshi was a man of many parts. After doing master graduation in economics, he taught the subject for a while in Mumbai’s Mumbai’s Sydenham College. He joined the Indian Postal Service (IPS) in 1958. During his decade stint with Indian Postal Service, Joshi sowed the seeds for the Pin-code which in the later years revolutionised postal network across the country.
After quitting the Indian Postal Service, Joshi worked for another ten years in the International Bureau Universal Postal Union (UPU), Bern.
Keen to take up farming in home village of Chakan near Pune and do something for agriculturalists, Joshi returned to India in 1967 and set up a year later the Shetkari Sanghatana, an outfit that helped galvanise farmers across the state and in various parts of the country in the later years.