Amid Covid-19 curbs, UP ropes in farm entrepreneurs to procure wheat

Lucknow / Apr 14, 2021

Amid rising Covid-19 cases and stiffening curbs, including night curfew and containment zones in the worst affected districts, the Uttar Pradesh government is engaging Farmer Producer Organisations (FPO) to aid in the ongoing wheat procurement process.

On one hand, the onboarding of the FPOs in the rabi marketing season 2021-22 for procuring wheat will boost purchases and provide additional income to the farmers and farm entrepreneurs, it would also help the state government in blunting the opposition attack regarding the ongoing farm protests.

The state government has already roped in about 150 Farmer producer Organisation (FPOs) and other farmer bodies in the wheat procurement process in UP.

 The procurement season, which officially kicked off on April 1, 2021, will continue till June 15 even as the Yogi Adityanath government had announced the procurement centres across 75 districts would function as long as the farmers continued to bring their produce.

So far, the government agencies has logged purchase of 145,000 tonnes of wheat, valued at about Rs 287 crore under the Minimum Support Price (MSP) mechanism, from more than 26,000 farmers at 5,332 procurement centres, of which 104 centres are operated by the Food Corporation of India (FCI).

The procurement process will gain momentum in the coming days, when all the nearly 6,000 functional centres, as claimed by the state government, will start receiving the cash crop.

According to the state government, the procurement was going on smoothly despite the recent spike in Covid-19 cases, while all necessary safety protocols were being adhered to. The farmers have been mandated to register themselves on the food and civil supplies (FCS) department portal to keep middlemen at bay, and the payment is being made directly into their bank accounts.

At the same time, the UP government has for the first time deployed electronic point of sale (e-PoS) machines for transparency in the procurement process and to weed out middlemen and pseudo farmers. For example, if a farmer wants to sell more than 100 quintals of wheat at the centre, the state revenue department will first verify the account/details to ensure transparency, while all the purchase hubs and warehouses have been geo-tagged.

A state government spokesperson claimed UP had in fact become the first state in India to usher in procurement through biometric authentication via the e-PoS device, and the new system will become operational at all the centres in phases soon.

Earlier, the MSP of what was hiked from Rs 1,925 in 2020-21 to Rs 1,975 per quintal (100 kg) in 2021-22. Under the present Yogi Adityanath dispensation, the state government has claimed to have paid more than Rs 29,000 crore to 3.3 million wheat farmers/growers in the last four years (2017-present).

Interestingly, the state government has not fixed the wheat procurement target this year to keep the farmers in good humour in the crucial election year when chief minister Yogi Adityanath will seek a reelection early next year.

For example, the UP government had procured more than 6.6 million tonnes (MT) of paddy in the recently concluded Kharif marketing season 2020-21 against the target of 5.5 MT.

UP wheat procurement table

*Compiled by Virendra Singh Rawat

 However, last year, the state government agencies and FCI could manage to procure a little more than 3.5 MT of wheat against the seasonal target of 5.5 MT.

 (Virendra Singh Rawat is a Lucknow based journalist, who writes on contemporary issues of industry, economy, agriculture, infrastructure, budget etc)