Punjab: Farmers to receive all dues in four days
Chandigarh, April 26: Punjab Chief Minister CaptainAmarinder Singh on Monday ordered the Food & Civil Supplies Department toclear the pending payments of farmers positively by the end of this month witha direction to all the heads of the procurement agencies to ensure promptlifting of entire wheat procured so far in mandis across the state.
Chairing a high level meeting of all the heads of theprocurement agencies and senior officers of Food & Civil SuppliesDepartment through video conferencing to review the latest position of totalarrival of wheat, its procurement, lifting and payment to the farmers, theChief Minister pointed out with some initial glitches like the introduction ofDBT system and shortage of gunny bags, has resulted in some slackness in theprocurement but now the situation has considerably improved leading to paymentof nearly Rs. 10,000 crore through DBT directly into the bank accounts of 5.59lac farmers. He asked the Mandi Board officials to complete the uploading ofrelevant details of farmers on GoI's 'AnaajKharid' portal expeditiously so asto ensure timely payment to the farmers. He said the balance payment worthnearly Rs. 2900 crore would be made soon once these requisite formalities arecompleted.
Reiterating his government's commitment to procure everysingle grain of wheat of the farmers, the Chief Minister further said that84.18 LMT out of 86.74 LMT wheat had already been procured and the remainingunsold wheat would also be procured immediately so that none of any farmershould unnecessarily stay at mandi. He however, asked the procurement agenciesto lift the remaining 46 LMT of wheat already stacked in mandis forthwith.
Meanwhile, Additional Chief Secretary Development AnirudhTiwari informed that the Punjab Mandi Board had set up ‘farmers help desks’ inthe grain markets across the state, where IT professionals along with Boardofficials were assisting the farmers in their registration on the new portal toensure timely payment directly into their bank accounts under the DBT scheme.He also informed that the Food and Civil Supplies department earliertransferred the payments into the bank accounts of nearly 22,000 arhtiyas(commission agents) for making further payments to the farmers. However, from thecurrent procurement season with the introduction of the DBT scheme, thepayments are now being directly transferred by the procurement agencies intothe bank accounts of the farmers.
In view of the recent surge of Covid cases , the state governmenthas also set up Covid vaccination camps in all 154 market committees across thestate to inoculate the people above the age of 45 years visiting grain marketsso that to ensure the health and safety of farmers, the arhtiyas, labourers,employees of procurements agencies and other stakeholders,.
On the issue of lifting, the Principal Secretary Food andCivil Supplies KAP Sinha apprised that at present, 16.84 crore gunny bags hadalready been used for packaging of wheat besides sufficient bags were alsobeing supplying to all the grain markets across the state.