Govt. To Buy Paddy Rejected By FCI

Chief Minister K Rosaiah on Friday assured the farmers of the state that the government will ensure that they get the Minimum Support Price for average quality paddy.

He said that the government will pay the farmers Rs. 1,030 per quintal of paddy rejected by the Food Corporation Of India (FCI) as per the Minimum Support Price fixed.

Rosaiah further assured farmers that they should not worry, since the government will buy the paddy even if FCI fails to purchase the crop from them.

The Chief Minister's assurance to the farmers came up during Question Hour on the floor of the assembly, as an intervention to opposition leader N Chandrababu Naidu's charge that the farmers were not being paid even 2 months after the date of purchase of paddy by the Civil Supplies department.

Naidu mentioned that it was incumbent on the government to take full responsibility of the purchase of the Nellore fine variety of paddy from the farmers, since it had encouraged them by supplying seeds for cultivation of that particular crop.

Rosaiah accepted that some cultivators of the Nellore fine variety rice, which was being affected with black spots during the past few sowing seasons, were apprehensive of the FCI refusing to buy the produce.

He said that the FCI would accept paddy damaged up to 5%, after he had requested the Union Agriculture Minister to relax the quality standards from the earlier figure of 4%.

Revealing that the Nellore variety of fine paddy was prominently sown in 4 districts of the state, the Chief Minister said that an estimated 12 lakh metric tons of the variety was cultivated during the last season.

He said that of these 12 lakh metric tons, the government had purchased 25,000 metric tons while the FCI had bought 1.2 lakh metric tons.

Rosaiah reiterated his assurance that the government will step in to buy the paddy if the FCI fails to do so, under the market intervention scheme.

The Chief Minister then reminded Naidu that the TDP regime took a decade to increase the MSP of paddy from Rs. 200 to Rs. 500. He reminded the House that the government had more than doubled the support price for paddy and fixed it at Rs. 1,030.

Courtesy: INN News