The Uttar Pradesh government said that it had ensured 99 percent payment of cane arrears of the farmers for the last crushing season.

Against a sum of Rs 35,463 crore payable to farmers by private and cooperative sector sugar mills, they have paid Rs 35,106 crore, which is 99 percent of the outstanding amount.

In addition to this, in the 2018-19 crushing season, Rs 9,588 crore has been paid against due cane price of Rs 17,709 crore and Rs.10,637 crore against the due cane price of previous years. Thus, a record payment of Rs.55,331 crore has been ensured by the Yogi Adityanath government, which is Rs 11,942 crore more than the total combined cane arrears of two previous crushing seasons i.e. 2015-16 and 2016-17 during the Akhilesh Yadav regime.

Apart from this, the recovery proceedings against defaulter sugar mills are also in progress. In the interest of farmers, to ensure timely cane price payments, the state government announced a soft loan scheme for giving financial assistance to sugar mills. A provision of Rs.4,000 crore was made in the state budget for the current fiscal 2018-19.

Under the scheme, so far loans of Rs 2,916 crore have been given to 53 sugar mills to enable them to clear their balance cane dues.

In addition to the above, the state government declared a financial assistance of Rs 4.50 per quintal of cane purchased by private sugar mills of the state in the 2017-18 crushing season, and Rs 419 crore has been paid to private sugar mills under this scheme.

The state government provided loans amounting to Rs 887crore to sugar mills in the cooperative sector and Rs 23 crore to public sector sugar mills to ensure 100 percent payment of cane arrears of previous crushing season 2017-18.

For shoring up the price of sugar in the open market, the state government fixed the minimum sale price of sugar at Rs 29 per kg in June 2018 and again increased it to Rs 31 per kg in February this year.

The Centre also increased the monthly sale quota of sugar mills.

With the efforts of the government, till date, out of total 119 sugar mills in private, cooperative and corporation sector, 109 have made 100 percent payment  to the farmers of the previous cane crushing season (2017-18).