Moga, September 8
With reports pouring in that the rice millers of Moga district were importing cheaper varieties of paddy and also custom milled rice from Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and other states, the state agricultural marketing board has set up special teams under a DGM-level official to conduct the physical verification (PV) of the mills.
The teams along with the local officials of the Board had started conducting PV in the Nihalsinghwala, Baghapurana and Moga sub-divisions of the district. As many as 10 mills had been checked during the last two days, a senior Board official revealed.
It was learnt that the agricultural marketing board has suffered huge losses due to the import of paddy and rice because the millers had not paid the marketing fee. They had imported the consignments of paddy and rice by paying only the entry tax at the VAT collection inter-state barriers.
They had imported the ‘masoori’ variety of rice, besides various other broken varieties, rice kinky, rice nakku and rice sella through the inter-state barriers. These could be mixed by them with the local varieties of milled rice while handing over the stock to the FCI for the central pool.
Last year, the miller failed to deliver as much as 2-lakh metric tonnes of rice in time to the central food agency. This backlog of the year 2010 continued even after procurement of the 2011 crop.
From the 2011 stock, the millers first completed the backlog for the year 2010 and now they are again facing a shortage of paddy which has forced them to import cheaper varieties from outside.
Insiders in the rice mill industry revealed that some local officials of the FCI were hand-in-glove with the millers for accepting the milled rice mixed with cheaper varieties imported from the other states.
Although senior authorities of the FCI deny such allegations but records reveal that as many as 75 samples of rice failed the quality tests in the past three years. But strict action was not taken against the millers except for asking them to change the stock.
“Such rice mills should be blacklisted by the state authorities,” said a senior official of the central food agency posted at New Delhi.
