All is well that ends well, with regard to the Rabi rice issue that had left lakhs of farmers in Telangana in a quandary. The Union Government has agreed to buy 40.20 lakh tonnes of rice from the Rabi season, from the State.
What the Centre is buying is the raw rice or fortified rice – and not parboiled rice, which the State has been selling for over four decades. Though it is less than about 46 lakh tonnes of rice that the Centre procured from the State, the bottom line is that it is going to buy the produce, ending weeks of speculation on whether it would buy it or not.
The Centre has made it clear several times that it has no problem in procuring the non-parboiled rice from the State. “We will procure the Rabi rice up to September 2022,” a senior official of the Union Ministry of ConsumerAffairs, Food and Public Distribution has said in a letter to the Telangana Civil Supplies Commissioner.
Sufficient stocks of parboiled
After weeks of verbal duel with the Union government over procurement of parboiled rice, the Telangana Government has taken a decision to buy the produce. The State government wrote a letter to the Union Government, informing its decision to sell raw rice.
The Union Government agreed to buy parboiled rice stocks from the State last year after taking a written undertaking that it won’t offer to sell parboiled rice in the future. It argued that the country had enough stocks of parboiled to meet the demand for the next 3-4 years.
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