The Odisha government today decided to procure 6,600 tonnes of potatoes at Rs 6 a kg from farmers even as the state assembly was stalled for the second consecutive day over alleged distress sale of the vegetable.
"The government has decided to procure 6,600 tonnes of potato through its own agency. The farmers will be paid the minimum support price of Rs 6 per kg as announced earlier," Cooperation Minister Damodar Rout said after a meeting of group of three ministers.
The meeting was chaired by Rout and attended by Agriculture Minister Pradip Maharathy and Food and Supplies minister Sanjay Dasburma. It was held as per the direction of Speaker Niranjan Pujari after MLAs cutting across party lines expressed their concern in the assembly over the plight of potato growers.
Blaming National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd (NAFED) for the mismanagement in procurement of potato from farmers in the state, Rout said "Nafed was assigned the job of potato procurement from 22 districts. However, it withdrew from the assignment on March 18 leading to chaos."
As per the decision taken at the meeting the state owned Co-operative Marketing Federation Ltd (Markfed) would procure potatoes from Bargarh, Jharsuguda and Balasore while Udyan Fresh under Horticulture Department would do so from Balasore, Khurda, Cuttack, Bhadrak and Puri districts.
While Markfed would procure 2000 MT of potatoes from Bargah and store them at the state's cold storage at Jagatpur, 2,500 MT of potatoes from Jharsuguda to be stored at a cold storage at Patia in Bhubaneswar and 1,000 MT of potatoes from the farmers of Balasore to be kept in that district.
Admitting that the state faced cold storage shortage to store the potatoes, Rout said Udyan Fresh would use its own facilities for storing the potatoes.
Replying to a question, Rout said the Markfed has not received a single rupee from the government towards procurement of potatoes.
Earlier, BJD member Ranendra Pratap Swain had alleged that the Markfed sat idle despite receiving Rs 50 crore from the state government.
