Centre Fumes as Telangana Cooks Up a Storm Over Paddy Procurement. News18 Explains Latest Flashpoint

Amid the ongoing paddy procurement row with the Centre, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) led by Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao staged a massive protest in Delhi on Monday, demanding 100 per cent procurement of rice grains from Telangana produced during the Rabi season. The political move comes in the backdrop of the BJP making steady gains in Telangana and attempting to create a perception of being the sole challenger to the ruling TRS.

News18 explains the controversy, FCI’s stand and what the farmers say:

WHAT IS TRS DEMANDING?

The issue is largely over the procurement of parboiled rice, which is majorly produced in Telangana during the Rabi season (November-April). Due to high temperature, local or common varieties of rice are soaked, boiled and dried in the mills to prevent breakage.

The TRS is insisting that more than 90 per cent of the rice grains produced in the state must be procured by the Centre, along with the parboiled rice stock yielded during the last Rabi season. TRS says the Centre’s ‘apathy’ has put the lives of 61 lakh farmers at stake.

“The Union government has crossed all limits of bias towards Telangana. We won’t back down about our farmers, their hard work, and harvest. The Modi government must come forward and procure every grain of paddy,” Nizamabad MLC and CM KCR’s daughter K Kavitha said.

CENTRE QUASHES TRS’S ALLEGATIONS

Union Minister for food and public distribution Piyush Goyal has slammed TRS for making “misleading and meaningless” claims.

Goyal said the TRS government itself signed an agreement stating they will no longer supply boiled rice this Rabi season. Further, Goyal also told Parliament that Telangana’s original target for parboiled rice was 24.75 LMT, which was enhanced to 45 LMT on the request of the state government. However, despite that, he said the state failed to supply more than 28 LMT.

“The TRS government is jumping into the future without even supplying what has been agreed upon. Based on clause number 18 of the FCI, we have a uniform MSP policy. We had indicated well in advance that for future, the FCI would no longer acquire parboiled rice from the state,” Goyal said.

The Centre has also made it clear that it will procure all the raw rice produced in the state and pinned the blame on the ruling TRS government for failing to supply the stock in time.

PROCUREMENT RULES & WHY FCI IS SAYING NO TO PARBOILED RICE

From deciding the stocks to pricing, the procurement process involves both the state and the central governments. Telangana’s civil supplies department procures paddy from farmers at the Minimum Support Price and sends it to private rice mills to be processed further as Custom Milled Rice (CMR). Following this, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) takes the requisite stock to run its public distribution system.

The FCI announced last September that it would no longer collect parboiled rice from the state due to low demand from states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Bihar, and Chhattisgarh which consume the particular variety of rice. FCI also communicated that it has enough stock to last up to four years.

As per the norm, the FCI reimburses the expenditure incurred by the state government for procuring, storing, and distributing the food grain stocks.

WHAT THE FCI DATA SAYS

FCI’s data shows rice procurement from Telangana went up from 36 lakh metric tonnes in 2017-18 to 94.54 metric tonnes by 2020-21. Similarly, paddy production in the state also shot up nearly five-fold. In 2016-2017, Telangana produced nearly 52 lakh metric tonnes of paddy, which rose exponentially to 2.5 crore metric tonnes in 2020-2021 owing to a good crop season and multiple irrigation projects undertaken by the state government.

HOW ARE FARMERS REACTING?

With FCI saying no to parboiled rice, the state government is reticent to procure this variety from farmers as it would burden the state’s coffers. Instead, it has asked farmers to look at growing cash crops like groundnut, and cotton. However, farmers dependant on rice cultivation as their only source of livelihood are reluctant to adapt to a sudden change.

Consortium of Indian Farmers Association (CIFA) chief P Chengal Reddy says the state must procure rice while the Centre must bring reforms and decentralise marketing, storage, export, and import policies.

“Despite having a bumper yield of paddy, farmers are now staring at an uncertain future. Telangana doesn’t consume parboiled rice but produces it for other states. It’s very difficult for a small farmer to shift to another crop without any incentives. Both Centre and state must jointly work on this,” Reddy said, adding that at least three farmers have already lost their lives over the issue.

Read all the Latest News India and Breaking News here