In a welcome and timely move the government, as it does every year to build its stockpile of food grains, has decided to double the procurement of boro paddy directly from farmers. To start from this last week of April, as reported, it would hopefully be a source of great relief for farmers in such trying times in the thick of a pandemic crisis. However, it would all depend on how efficiently the assigned people doing the job of buying the rice are able to avoid the interference of middlemen or various vested groups who often come in the way to deprive farmers of the officially set enhanced rate of grain purchase.
It is further hoped that unlike in some previous years when the bumper harvest would often lose its meaning to farmers as their products of hard labour could not sell at a rewarding price in the market, this year would prove to be different. Farmers should be duly compensated this time as the government has a big stake in having its grain silos well-stocked with food grains when unforeseen uncertainties loom on the horizon.
However, to allow things to happen in the way it should, the government must rid its well-meaning procurement process of any lapses so that it can deliver the goods to the intended beneficiaries ---farmers. The system of lottery to select the lucky farmers who would be able to sell their crop to the government buyers at the official rate, for example, is required to be made foolproof. For, it so happens often that some farmers so selected are not the desired beneficiaries of the system-the small, marginal farmers and the sharecroppers, but the ones who are not farmers. Also, a strong monitoring of the entire system of purchase should be in place to plug any loophole through which traders, middlemen or politically influential quarters might creep in to bias or defeat the very purpose of the process. So, the government will have to take the highest precaution to ensure that real farmers, who must be protected at this time of a pandemic-created crisis at all costs, are finally able to get the benefit of the lottery-based purchasing system.
The process of lottery apart, there are also other conditions of the government's buying procedure that would need a rethinking so that those are more relaxed to enable the intended farmers to get the full benefit of the system. The existing condition of the permitted level of moisture content of the rice eligible for sale to the government buyers is a case in point. Farmers are learnt to have found it too tough to maintain the set standard as the traditional method of drying their rice or paddy they can afford is not efficient enough to meet the desired level of 14 per cent moisture content for the rice acceptable to government buyers.
Understandably, any relaxation of condition in this regard would imply an added cost for the government in terms of lost weight of the rice or paddy so bought from farmers. But then does not the whole purpose of the system mean to help poor farmers so they can earn an extra sum of money in place of what they might get from the market? The government would do well to give a more serious thought to the matter and consider granting the beneficiary farmers a more relaxed condition to fulfil while selling their rice to the government buyers under the present system.
