ONGOLE: As many as 20,000 Bengal gram crop cultivators in the district are awaiting government’s financial assistance in the form of marketing intervention amount, more eagerly so, after the amount was paid to some farmers.
Since 2017-18, the minimum support price (MSP) has not been given to the farmers and their stocks from three years —2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19 —have been kept in the nearby private cold storage units.
After several rounds of negotiations and talks, the government agreed to sanction Rs 1,500 per quintal, up to 30 quintals to each farmer. Hence, the total amount stands at Rs 45,000.
To distribute this amount, the government has ordered the district Agriculture department officials to prepare a list of the genuine Bengal gram farmers from the list of all farm produce stock owners, who kept the stock in the cold storage of the district.
To finalise the genuine farmers, Agriculture staff crosschecked the names with the 2018-19 E-Crop data and out of 26,000 farmers, only 7,300 were identified as genuine cultivators. However, the report as per the Jilla Raithu Sangham (JRS) leaders heavily differed with this report.
The JRS claims that all 26,000 farmers should get the amount. Recently, the government also sanctioned the payment for 2018-19 to 7,300 farmers and the said amount was deposited into the bank accounts of 6,990 farmers.
“District Agriculture department staff didn’t work properly in listing of the exact number of Bengal gram crop farmers,” D Gopinath and M Srinivasa Rao, JRS leaders said.