As the harvest season begins, the Nagapattinam administration has put in place measures to prevent middlemen from transporting paddy from neighbouring districts to the Direct Purchase Centres (DPCs).
The district administration has acted upon information that harvested paddy of samba/ thaladi had been surreptitiously stocked in Sikkal and Thirumarugal areas. Collector A. Arun Thamburaj has constituted teams consisting of officials of Tamil Nadu Civil Supplies Corporation, Village Administrative Officers and Assistant Agricultural Officers to carry out inspections and to make sure that paddy loads from outside Nagapattinam are not brought to the local DPCs with fake documentation.
“Those indulging in such activity will be subjected to criminal action. The public who are hand in glove with the purported middlemen will also have to face legal consequences”, the Collector has warned.
Information about such illegal activity could be passed on to the authorities over phone: 9442225003, he said.
In the wake of the district administration’s directive, officials of the Tamil Nadu Civil Supplies Corporation had conducted checks at the storage points of the DPCs.
Ruling out illegal stocking of paddy at the DPCs, a senior official of the Tamil Nadu Civil Supplies Corporation, however, acknowledged that there were manpower constraints in determining stocking of paddy brought from other districts in private godowns in interior villages.
Officials of Agriculture Department said the practice of middlemen to bring in paddy from specific locations in other districts where the DPCs were located far-away has indeed been a grey area unattended for long.
Farmers who find DPCs inaccessible find a reason to sell their produce to the middlemen for 20 to 30 percent less than the extent of procurement value at the DPCs.
As the middlemen in most cases were small-time farmers themselves, the officials were facing difficulty in handling the issue. The middlemen it was said gain access of the records of agricultural fields maintained by the Village Administrative Officers in order to link the record of paddy stock brought from other districts with the fallow swathes in the purview of the DPCs.
According to Ramalingam, a progressive farmer, the issue could be addressed effectively if the records maintained by the VAOs were verified precisely vis-a-vis the stocks of paddy procurement at the DPCs, on a constant basis.
