Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said here on Thursday that there was no impact of lockdown on agricultural activities like harvesting, procurement of food grains and marketing of agricultural produce as the state government had taken special measures to protect the agriculture sector from the adverse impact of the coronavirus pandemic induced cessation of economic activities.
“The lockdown could have adversely impacted the harvesting of wheat and supply chain of certain essential commodities. But the UP government had permitted agricultural activities which prevented the possible inconvenience that could have been caused to the farmers,” the chief minister said while participating in video conferencing presided over by Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar on Agriculture Infrastructure Fund.
The chief minister said: “Harvesting of most of the Rabi crops except wheat was completed before the lockdown was imposed by the Centre and UP also benefited from the communication established by the Centre with the state under Atmanirbhar programme announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
He said adequate number of agricultural implements like harvester and reaper were made available by he state government for the seamless harvesting of the remaining Rabi crops like wheat. He said as many as 4,774 harvesters and 5,153 reapers were in operation in the state for the harvesting of the wheat crop.
Yogi said the import of agricultural implements from other states was also permitted for facilitating the harvesting operations.
“The UP government and other official agencies had set up 5,953 wheat procurement centres across the state for purchasing wheat directly from the farmers under minimum support price scheme. So far over 35 lakh metric ton of wheat has been procured from the farmers. Other Rabi crops like oilseeds, peas and pulses were also purchased from the farmers,” he said.
The chief minister said that sugarcane was the most important cash crop in Uttar Pradesh and during the recently-ended cane crushing season, all the 119 sugar mills operated at their installed capacity and produced 1.27 crore MT of sugar during 2019-20 season. He said the sugar mills also produced 1.5 crore litres of sanitisers for fighting the coronavirus pandemic and also generated electricity worth Rs 1,500 crore.
Yogi said in a major reform in the agriculture marketing sector, the UP government had denotified 45 agriculture produce from the purview of the UP Agriculture Marketing Committees Act and exempted them from mandi fee, thus enabling the farmers to sell their produce anywhere in the state to the buyers of their choice .
He said a policy was being formulated by the state government for setting up FPOs (farmers producers organisations) across the state. He said two FPOs would be set up in each of the over 800 development blocks in the state.
The chief minister expressed satisfaction over the acreage under the Kharif and Zaid crops.
“The UP government has ensured the availability of agricultural inputs like seed and fertilisers well before the sowing of the Kharif crops started and this has resulted in sowing of Zaid crops in 9.3 lakh hectares, far more than the target set by the Agriculture department, and area under Kharif also increased to about 99 lakh hectares,” the chief minister said.