For sugar body, it's a season of controversy

Millers have accused ISMA of overstating last year's production and delaying the decision on imports

There never will be any finality about the exact size of a crop till it has been harvested. This is as true for India as for any other country. 

In spite of this conventional wisdom, the Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA) has recently come in for criticism, including from a past president, for its failure to notice “early warning signs” about the worsening state of the sugarcane crop in Maharashtra, the country’s biggest producer of sugar, and Karnataka. As a result, for a good number of months during the current 2016-17 season (October to September), ISMA went on “overstating” sugar production,