With the monsoon arriving late in Maharashtra,agriculture experts advised farmers to go for soybean crop instead of moong and lentil. Soybean was,therefore,sowed on around 26 lakh hectares of land across the state in the second week of July. Two weeks on,the farmers were shocked to find that seedlings did not germinate on over 20,000 hectares of land. I carried out sowing on July 10; germination usually takes place in 5-7 days. After about 11 days,seedlings emerged in around 25 per cent of the area only, said Subhash Deshmukh,a farmer at Shrirampur,Ahmednagar. The agriculture department has received complaints from farmers of several districts about the abnormally low percentage of emergence in soybean seeds this year. A majority of the complaints about faulty seeds are from those procured from the state-owned National Seed Corporation,popularly known as Mahabeej. In In a week,Akola headquarters of Mahabeej received more than 500 complaints from farmers. A majority of the complaints about s who are seeking compensation, Minister of State for Agriculture Gulab Devkar ordered a probe to look into the reasons behind non-germination of seeds provided by Mahabeej. U I Gawande,director,quality control department,Mahabeej,said: A committee has been formed to look into the matter. Laboratory tests of seeds have showed that some of the lots were defective. The deformities may have developed later as seeds were bought in April-May and stored till July.
