Telangana’s Grain Drain

lalita iyer musings

“I was for once glad that a government official felt the same concern as I, regarding the procurement of produce, including paddy, jowar, and maize.” I must declare and confess this is entirely a knee-jerk reaction, for I do not know much agriculture. It is a humongous subject and procurement, a huge part of it.

On the other hand, it stuns me to read about young couples moving to India and to our own Telangana and making money in lakhs from growing vegetables, fruits on small tracts of land. In fact our ex-CM K Chandrasekhar Rao had a penchant for growing green capsicum and I am sure he made his moolah! The red and yellow varieties or peppers as they are called can be afforded only by the rich. 

I have grown up reading about the farmer’s wisdom and knowledge about predicting weather, yet he is at the receiving end due to unseasonal rains, (the ever famous El Nino effect). I wonder, is the farmer failing in his prediction or is the weather pattern changing so much.

The paddy farmer in Telangana is now in dire straits as the government machinery has failed to procure the produce. A district collector went on to admit and expressed shock on the 'negligence, lack of coordination, and monitoring failures in paddy procurement' in a mandal. He also issued show cause notices to several officers at the mandal level. His argument being that the paddy procurement (again an annual and seasonal process) was not being supervised, causing great inconvenience to the farmer.  

I thought the buck stopped with the Collector, him being the head of the district? So, why is he complaining against the district officials? A tad confused but then things did get confusing the moment the state of Telangana grew from 10 districts to 33 districts. It is now difficult to remember the names of the various districts, the names of the Superintendents of Police and names of Collectors. 

Meanwhile the paddy procurement has become a point of contention with the Opposition party BRS slamming the Congress Government. The Govt claims 80% procurement, reports suggest 30% has been acquired.  

N Uttam Kumar Reddy, minister of irrigation and civil supplies of Telangana, said the Congress government was executing the largest paddy procurement operation in Telangana’s history, 'despite severe manpower shortages, massive logistical challenges and an unprecedented scale of arrivals.' He added that the Congress government was making an effort to procure every grain brought by farmers and that every rupee reached the farmers' accounts. 

“This is a record-breaking Rabi procurement operation happening on a war footing  

across Telangana,” Reddy declared. The truth lies somewhere in between. Small time farmers can ill afford delayed payment. And if the state government plays the villain, where will they go. Sure, not all farmers faced the issue of non-payment due to delay in procurement, but his is about those affected few. 

While the farmer might be a wise man, weather wise and rooted to the earth, every farmer you talk to tells a different story. For two harvests in a year, it is linked to good land, proper power and water supply and of course good seeds. And then that his crop is procured at the right time at a good rate. And all this if he is not affected by bad weather. 

— Lalita Iyer