The Odisha government’s decision to remove a staggering 1.7 million plots from this year’s kharif paddy procurement records is a laudable move. After receiving complaints about fabricated data of cultivable land being uploaded, the state food supplies and consumer welfare department went in for a satellite survey and found that at least 1.79 million plots had been faked. Bizarre as it may sound, plots bearing forest, water bodies, orchards and fallow tracts were registered as paddy-growing land.
Odisha follows a centralised process under which farmers can register areas under rice cultivation by uploading land and other details. Registered growers are then issued procurement passes, which can be presented at mandis during the purchase process. Much of this system was developed to weed out middlemen and fraud at district levels, so that farmers get their due. However, the detection of such a huge number of fake plots reveals the extent to which unscrupulous elements could go to punch holes in the procurement mechanism, which is an elaborate and tedious process.
Odisha’s foodgrains productions stood at 141 lakh tonnes last year, of which rice was a major constituent. During the kharif season, paddy is grown over 36 lakh hectares. Against last season’s paddy procurement target of 57 lakh tonnes, the government raised this year’s target to 65 lakh tonnes, riding on the bumper production last season.
This also makes it a lucrative business for unethical elements. Traders from neighbouring Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh take advantage of the farmer’s haste to dispose of their produce by nearly matching the minimum support price of Rs 2,183 and collecting paddy from the doorstep.
This year, the kharif procurement process started a little late, which also prompted farmers in the bordering districts to sell off their harvest to private traders. All this points to the fact that greedy players are always at play to make efforts to bleed the exchequer.
The government’s paddy procurement bill runs into thousands of crores of rupees every year, which is why pilferage remains a constant threat. Despite efforts to cleanse the system, opposition parties have always flagged the issue of re-injection of old rice into a fresh procurement process. While Odisha has done well in weeding out fakery through the use of technology, it must continue efforts to plug the leaks that exist at the district level to make it foolproof.