As the clouds of uncertainty looms large over Punjab’s agrarian economy due to unseasonal rains, the State farmers are demanding not just compensation for the damaged crop but relaxation in the procurement norms due to growing losses.
For pruning their miseries, a central team will be visiting the State next week to evaluate the wheat grains arriving in mandis during the ongoing procurement to work out relaxation norms for procurement. However, the State’s farming community is ruing over the Centre’s “apathetic” attitude towards the State by disallowing the relaxation in the specifications, including moisture content and the broken grains, while granting the same to “23 other States”.
“We want the relaxation in specifications. The Centre has discriminated against Punjab by giving nothing to us, while relaxing specifications in the 23 other States. This is complete discrimination and nothing else,” the State’s Bharti Kisan Union president Baldev Singh Mianpur told The Pioneer. At the same time, he complained over the slow procurement operations, “low rates” , and the prevailing mismanagement.
“There is no arrangement of lifting of the grains even after it has been bought. Only Food Corporation of India (FCI) is procuring wheat, and no other agency is coming. At Khanna, FCI is buying at very low rates,” said Mianpur, expressing his “dissatisfaction” over the ongoing procurement operations that started on April 1.
The Centre has allowed the FCI to procure up to nine per cent of shriveled and broken grain in Haryana as against the limit of six per cent, besides wheat having up to 50 per cent of luster loss. On the other hand, any such relaxation has not been awarded to Punjab, and the State Government is planning to carryout a survey to access the damage done to the crop. The State Government is now awaiting the central team’s visit and also the results of its survey.
“Wheat grains have started arriving in mandis with higher moisture content because of the unseasonal rains in the region. To evaluate the quality of grains, a technical team would visit the state and collect the grain samples for the purposes of getting them scientifically tested in the laboratories for assessing damaged grains due to unseasonal rains and hail storms in the province,” said the State Food and Civil Supplies Minister Adaish Pratap Singh Kairon.
He said that the interests of the farmers would not be compromised at any cost while deciding on the Centre’s relaxation norms for wheat procurement. The farmers have already suffered at the hands of natural calamities and now the Punjab Government would not let them lose further for no fault of theirs, he added.
Kairon said that he had already met the Union Minister for Consumer Affairs and had briefed him on the changed moisture and colour contents of wheat due to recent heavy rains and hails and he had also assured the state to relax the norms after assessing the situation on arrival of wheat in the mandis.
The Minister said that all arrangements have been made to procure 125 lakh tonnes of wheat during this season and the first installment of sanctioned cash credit limit of Rs14,640 crore for ensuing procurement of foodgrain in Punjab for the Rabi marketing season 2015 has also been received.
The State Government has already sought Rs717 crore relief package from the Centre for its farmers who had suffered loss of standing Rabi crops due to unseasonal rain and hailstorms recently.As per the proposal submitted to the Centre, the State has projected that standing crop worth Rs717 crore was damaged over an area of 294,177 hectares. Compensation of Rs10,000 per acre has also been sought from the Centre.