Hyderabad: Providing the much-needed relief to rice millers in Telangana State, the Centre agreed to procure Custom Milled Rice (CMR) pertaining to last Yasangi season (2019-20) from millers till February 28. The decision comes in the wake of the initiative taken by Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao who pursued the issue with the Centre. As against 43 lakh tonnes of CMR to be handed over to the Food Corporation of India (FCI) by December 31 last, the millers had so far handed over 37 lakh tonnes.
In a statement, Civil Supplies Minister Gangula Kamalakar said due to various factors, there was a delay in supply of six lakh tonnes of CMR from the millers to the FCI and the Corporation did not respond to the requests from the State government to extend the procurement date. When this was brought to his notice, the Chief Minister responded immediately and took up the issue with the Centre following which FCI agreed to extend the procurement date. The Minister directed the rice millers to hand over the remaining six lakh tonnes of CMR to the FCI within the stipulated time.
Meanwhile, the Vaanakalam season for 2020-21 witnessed a bumper paddy crop. As per directions of the Chief Minister, the Civil Supplies department opened 6,505 paddy purchase centres and procured about 48.42 lakh tonnes of paddy. The paddy purchases have reached the final stage and about 6,139 centres of the total 6,505 purchasing centres have been already been shut down. Of the total paddy procurement, coarse variety accounted for about 28.2 lakh tonnes and fine variety of paddy 20.22 lakh tonnes.
“We purchased paddy worth Rs 9,136 crore from 10.92 lakh farmers. Around Rs 8,696 crore have been already deposited into the bank accounts of farmers providing the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for their produce,” Kamalakar said. He said the efforts of the Chief Minister over the past six years have been yielding positive results as paddy acreage was increasing every year and was greatly contributing to the development of the agrarian sector.
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