Wheat procurement during the ongoing Rabi Marketing season (RMS) 2023-24, till 30th May 2023, progressed to reach 262 lakh metric ton (LMT) which has already surpassed the previous year’s total procurement of 188 LMT by 74 LMT, said ministry of consumer affairs, food and public distribution. The online wheat procurement operations have already benefited about 21.27 lakh farmers with Minimum Support Price (MSP) outflow of about Rs 47,000 crore. Most contribution in the procurement has come from three procuring states of Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana with procurement of 121.27 LMT, 70.98 LMT and 63.17 LMT respectively, the ministry said in a statement.
What helped healthy procurement?
The ministry said that the major contributing factors in healthy procurement this year has been the grant of relaxation by the government in quality specifications of wheat affected due to untimely rains; opening of procurement centres at village/ panchayat level; carrying out procurement through Co-operative Societies/ Gram Panchayats/ Arhatias, etc. in addition to designated procurement centres for better outreach and permission to engage FPOs for procurement operations.
Further, the rice procurement also showed smooth progress with a total of 385 LMT of rice procured till 30 May 2023 during the Kharif Marketing Season (KMS) 2022-23 with another 110 LMT yet to be procured. “A quantity of 106 LMT rice has been estimated to be procured during the Rabi crop of KMS 2022-23,” the ministry said. With that, the combined stock position of wheat and rice in the central pool is over 579 LMT (wheat 312 LMT and rice 267 LMT) which has placed India in a comfortable position to meet its food grains requirement.
The government had, at the beginning of the session, set a target to procure 34 MT of wheat to bolster stock which had plummeted to 8.4 MT on April 1 which was the lowest since 2016. As on May 1, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) had wheat stock of 28.52 MT while the government needs 18.4 MT annually for the implementation of the national food security act.
Earlier, the food ministry had allowed purchase of shriveled and broken grain up to 18 per cent from farmers with prescribed value cut against the existing limit of 6 per cent in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. The ministry, on March 31, had relaxed procurement norms, by allowing purchase of grains with lustre losses above 10 per cent from farmers in Madhya Pradesh with a marginal value cut of only Rs 5.31/quintal against the MSP of Rs 2,125/quintal for the current season.