BHUBANESWAR: The Odisha State Seeds Corporation (OSSC) may incur a loss of about Rs 4 crore due to low off-take of certified paddy seeds during the kharif season.The state-owned corporation has sold only 2.46 lakh quintal of seeds to the farmers by the end of September as against 3.65 lakh quintal sold last year. With a stock of 42,000 quintal unsold seeds, it will now be forced to sell the the same as non-seed for which tender will be floated. The non-seed paddy generally command a much lesser price and the corporation will bear the loss.
The state government had set a target to sell 5.25 lakh quintal of paddy seeds in this kharif season. The corporation, however, decided to procure half of the target sensing loss due to poor demand from the farmers. It had maintained a stock of 2.88 lakh quintal, sources in the corporation said. Attributing the low off-take of paddy seeds to the insistence of the government to continue the direct benefit transfer (DBT) scheme, sources said farmers are reluctant to pay the full cost of the seed upfront to get the subsidy later as majority of them are not financially sound.
The directorate of agriculture and food production had issued a standard operating procedure (SOP) for transaction of seeds under DBT through an OTP-based authentication system.As per the system, farmers will pay the full cost of the seeds to the OSSC-appointed agencies. An OTP will be send to the farmer after the purchase and the subsidy amount will be transferred to his account once OTP is received in the prescribed app.
Though the SOP said that the subsidy of the farmers must reach the beneficiary account a day after purchase, the sources said a large number of complaints came to the corporation that the subsidy amount is not released in time.The scheme officers and field functionaries of the agriculture department are responsible for timely payment.The agriculture department had decided to implement e-RUPI, a digital payment solution, for the sale of seeds from kharif 2022, which could not be made ready before May.