Despite unseasonal rains adversely impacting paddy crop in many districts of Orissa, the state government is confident of achieving the last year’s record rice production because the loss is expected to be compensated by rise in output in other districts
Agriculture minister Damodar Rout said that due to expectation of a bumper production in most of the districts of the state, the kharif rice production is expected to be close to last year’s production of 6.3 million tonne.
Meanwhile for working out a package for the affected farmers, the state government has asked all the district collectors of the state to submit a comprehensive report about the crop damages due to recent rains by Wednesday.
Many parts of state saw widespread rains during the first week of December due to which mostly harvested kharif paddy crops stored in the fields were damaged.
?Besides the financial package and loan rescheduling, we will ask farmers to grow pulses during rabi season as moisture content in soil is quite high at present because of recent rains,? Rout told FE.
During the kharif season, Orissa is targeting at the production of 6.3 million tonne of rice against last year’s achievement of 6.2 million tonne. Chief minister Naveen Patnaik on Sunday visited rain-affected districts of Gajapati, Ganjam, Bolangir and Subarnapur for assessing the damage and announced that package for the farmers would be announced after getting reports from the collectors.
Rout also said that late rains would not impact the overall rice production in the state which is expected to be around 7 million tonne. While the consumption including the requirement for the public distribution system is around 6 million tonne, the state is facing huge challenges pertaining to marketing of excess production of rice
?As we produce a large chunk of boiled rice, the market is limited to only West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and parts of Bihar,? Rout said. Most of these states are already sufficient in the rice production.
Although Orissa got normal monsoon rains during the years, however according to the state government assessment more than 10,000 villages out of the total state villages of 51,000 village got deficient rains and faced drought like condition.
Orissa contributes about 6- 7% of the country’s total rice production and has about four million hectare under paddy cultivation. More than 62% of its cropped area is rain-fed. The primary crops that depend on monsoon in the state are paddy, oilseeds, pulses, millet, and cotton.
India?s rice production during 2010-11 is likely to fall short of 100 million tonne target mainly attributed to drought and floods in parts of the country. The rice output could be around 95 million tonne in case of good rabi crop. In 2008-09, India produced 99.5 million tonne of rice while last year because of drought the production was around 89 million tonne.
The traditional rice growing states of eastern India constitute Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and eastern parts of Uttar Pradesh, which account for 61% of the total rice area and 51% of total rice production in the country.
