Punjab’s blighted harvest — A bumper paddy crop that nobody’ll touch

Lal’s expression is grim, his reaction now almost a refrain of his two-day visit to oversee paddy procurement in Punjab. “The FCI will be ruined if we buy such paddy,” he says, crushing the chalky grains with his fingers, and tells his team, “Only buy paddy which meets the specifications. I will not allow the FCI to be liquidated.”

He proceeds to leave the Mandi and the scene turns unruly. Angry farmers, realising the visit doesn’t augur well for them, cordon off his car. Mit Singh, who has been waiting for 10 days now to sell his paddy bangs the windscreen, “Tuse nahin ja sakde. Pehle dasoo, Agar ghar che kala bachcha jameya, usno nekal dein aasee? (You cannot go away. First tell us, if a dark-skined child is born, should we throw him out?)”

Police officials intervene, the farmers are gently pushed back and the cars drive off. The FCI team moves on, even as the road on the other side is lined with paddy-laden trolleys, all heading hopefully toward the Ajitwal Mandi.

Punjab’s problem of plenty is worsening every day with the bumper paddy crop of 125 lakh metric tonnes arriving at the Mandis. Paddy procurement began on September 21 and the FCI has so far lifted one-sixth of the 30 lakh tonnes it expects to purchase. Rice millers and other state procurement have been even slower in their purchases, resulting in rural Punjab bursting at the seams with unsold paddy.

More than the grain glut, it’s the high incidence of Punjab’s paddy being blighted with fungal disease or being discolored and broken that has caused a crisis-like situation. Bhure Lal’s visit to Mandis located in nine districts showed that the paddy was likely to meet the required specifications only in three or four Mandis. Testing done by the State Civil Supplies in the Lakho-ke Behram Mandi last month, in fact, revealed that the extent of damage in tested stocks was 32 per cent. And H.S. Sethi, a quality inspector with the FCI says almost 80 per cent of stocks is being rejected every day. “With every rejection, I fear the farmers will attack me. They are getting more and more restless with every passing day,” he warned.

Tension has gripped the state but the FCI bosses are firm on rejecting stocks which don’t make the grade — under three percent broken grains and three percent damage on account of discoloring or shriveling. Dr S.S. Grewal, FCI’s Joint Manager (quality control) says they may be witnessing a spread of the helmintho sporium fungus, which could either be soil-born or seed-born and needs urgent investigation by the Department of Agriculture. Adds D.P. Reddy FCI’s Senior Regional Manager, “The fungal disease was noticed last year but is rampant this year. There is great pressure on us to buy this paddy but under no conditions will it give us milled rice which will meet specifications.”

The problem has been accentuated with the fact that the FCI is already holding over 30 lakh metric tonnes of rice milled from 1997 onward, put in the Under Relaxed Conditions (URL) category. One-third of this has been stored in Punjab and Bhure Lal says there is no state government which is willing to buy the stocks even for the Public Distribution System. Under the URL category, paddy with a damage of 4.5 per cent was accepted, dangerously close to the 5 per cent limit after which food grains attracted provisions of the Food and Adulteration Act (PFA) and declared unfit for human consumption.

The dilemma before procurement agencies is that if defective paddy was purchased or specifications for damaged paddy were raised to 10 per cent — which the farmers were demanding — the milled rice would again fail quality tests, causing severe financial losses and a worse glut than ever before. And even as the FCI was testing paddy samples during Bhure Lal’s visit, there were reports that another inspection team comprising experts from the Central and State Government were arriving in Punjab for an inspection of the Mandis.

All this means very little to the desperate paddy farmers who are also being chided for indulging in early sowing and harvesting of paddy, which has added the additional problem of milky green paddy arriving at the Mandis. But as Manmohan Singh, a farmer who waits with his unsold stock at Dhilwan Mandi, in Kapurthala puts it, they have been selling even more “nikkama (sub-standard)” paddy in the previous years. “This year the FCI does’nt want to but our stocks. We will be forced to sell our stocks at poor rates to the millers or take it back home to feed our animals.”