BHUBANESWAR: In the wake of chaotic online token system for paddy procurement and farmers’ agitations over mandi mismanagement during the kharif marketing season (KMS), the State government on Monday directed district collectors to form joint verification teams for field verification of cropped area and the actual cultivators.
The directive came in the wake of complaints from farmers and Opposition political parties about the existence of ghost farmers in the list of registered farmers under the paddy procurement automation system (P-PAS).Reviewing the progress of farmers’ registration for sale of paddy under minimum support price (MSP) with collectors, Chief Secretary Suresh Mahapatra asked them to form joint verification teams involving the field level officers from the departments of Agriculture, Cooperation, Revenue and Water Resources to weed out possibilities of fake crop area registration and blocking the entry of unscrupulous middlemen into the system.
“The field verification should be combined with verification of actual land record, kisam (category) of land, crop area, source of irrigation, bank details and mobile number of the farmers. The areas under paddy cultivation need cross verification with satellite data of ORSAC,” Mahapatra said. After field verification, SMS on cropped areas should be sent to registered farmers for the purpose of procurement. As payment to the farmers is done through their bank accounts, all the payments are required to be integrated with the online public financial management system (PFMS).
The Collectors were asked to complete the field verification by September 7 and primary agriculture cooperative societies (PACS) directed to upload the digitised data by September 18. The master list of all the genuine farmers and sharecroppers should be ready September 30, 2021. With only two weeks left for registration of farmers with August 16 being the cut off date, the district Collectors were asked to ensure that not a single genuine farmer is deprived from selling paddy to the government during kharif marketing season (KMS) beginning November 1, 2021.
Principal Secretary, Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare, Vir VikramYadav said that an interactive voice recording system (IVRS) will be set up to handle farmers’ queries on registration and procurement. A dedicated toll free number 1967 has been set up for receiving grievances of the farmers. He further informed that 1.74 lakh farmers have registered their names through 2,857 PACS for KMS 2021-22 by end of July. As many as 17,32,948 farmers were registered last year.