Rice millers have a lot to cheer from Union Food and Public District System Minister Piyush Goyal’s assurance to BJP State president Bandi Sanjay Kumar in New Delhi on Friday that the Centre will resume procurement of custom-milled rice from the State.
Otherwise, 93 lakh tonnes of paddy is lying idle at 3,300 small and big rice mills across the State since June 7 due to abrupt halt to custom milling called by the Centre. As a result, the stocks already handed over by the State government to the millers were now exposed to damage caused by sprouting from grain, discolouring on account of rain and feeding on grain by rodents and monkeys.
The main reason for halt to milling operations after two months of hectic activity was the failure of the government to implement the sixth phase of Prime Minister’s Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana of supply of free rice to the poor to overcome the impact of COVID from April to September. This was after the government drew its quota of 1.90 lakh tonnes of free rice from FCI godowns but did not take up distribution in April and May.
The State informed the Centre that it did not undertake distribution for technical reasons but will compensate by extending the implementation to October and November.
This was not a stray incident of stopping procurement as the FCI had taken up physical verification of stocks at mills in March and May and found several irregularities. The millers also did not cooperate in verification as they dumped the bags in “unaccountable position” at 562 mills and made it impossible for the teams to count them.
This was not the first time that issues of rice procurement rocked the State. Earlier this year, the State government was in confrontation with the Centre after the latter refused to lift parboiled rice which was pre-cooked from husk by steaming. The State government argued that it could only give parboiled rice because the paddy cultivated in rabi and milled post-April was not fit for producing raw rice in adequate quantities because the milling will result in broken rice of large percentage due to higher temperatures.
With no other option due to the Centre’s strict stand not to buy parboiled rice, the State went ahead with opening thousands of procurement centres in villages in April-May and bought about 50 lakh tonnes of paddy at the minimum support price of ₹1,960 a quintal. Another 40 lakh tonnes of paddy pertaining to previous two seasons was already accumulated at mills.
