LIVE TV
Odisha
Recommended Stories
Bhubaneswar: In an all-out attack against the Odisha government, a delegation of BJP MPs from Odisha led by Union Minister of Petroleum and Steel Dharmendra Pradhan on Tuesday accused the ruling-BJD of misleading the farmers on issues of paddy procurement.
Pradhan, who led the team from the State and met the Union Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Minister Piyush Goyal today, alleged that the Odisha government has been belying its own systematic failure in governance and providing allied agricultural services to farmers in the State.
"Despite this years’ better-than-expected harvest of paddy due to a favourable monsoon, farmers in Odisha are suffering due to State Govt. apathies, administrative inefficiencies and long-standing malpractices," Pradhan quoted himself in his Twitter page as apprising the matter to Goyal.
He also informed Goyal that the State government of Odisha did not revise its ceiling of paddy procurement of 19 quintals for every acre of irrigated land and 13 quintals for every acre of non-irrigated land in spite of the bumper crop yield this season.
As a result, thousands of farmers were left with unsold paddy which they had to sell at half the price of MSP fixed by the Centre, i.e Rs 1868 per quintal. Farmers are also being forced to sell their harvest at throwaway prices due to administrative failures of the Odisha government, the senior parliamentarian noted.
The delegation of the parliamentarians sought the personal intervention of Goyal 'to assess the unethical abuse of authority by the Odisha government in paddy procurement and direct it to expeditiously complete procurement of unsold paddy for the welfare of farmers in the state'.
Bargarh MP Suresh Pujari, who was part of the BJP parliamentarian team, said, “Procurement of the Kharif season’s paddy this year is in crisis. Thousands of tokens have lapsed and there are no targets. Thousands of paddy sacks are lying unsold at mandis, out in the open and left to rot much to the dismay of the entire farming community in the State.”
“We have urged Union Minister Piyush Goyal to send a high-level central team to Odisha which will investigate the failure in paddy procurement system in the State,” said Pujari.
