Bhubaneswar: Revenue minister Suresh Pujari on Monday urged the opposition to engage in a direct and constructive discussion on paddy procurement in the assembly, accusing it of deliberately holding up debate despite repeated requests from the treasury bench. His remarks came even as BJD announced a protest in the city on Tuesday over the issue and stalled assembly proceedings for five consecutive days.Addressing a news conference, Pujari said procurement during the current kharif season was broadly on track, rejecting allegations that the process has slowed down. He said higher input subsidies encouraged more farmers to shift to paddy, resulting in a rise in cultivation and production and increasing pressure on procurement systems.
The minister acknowledged that Odisha’s procurement infrastructure long suffered from gaps — such as inadequate farmer facilities, limited quality-testing mechanisms, and the absence of standardised mandis — before the current govt came into office. “A state with such a large paddy-growing base needed stronger infrastructure. We are working to build that,” he said.Pujari said the state is now focusing on major upgrades, including developing 100 model mandis and creating warehouse capacity of 5 lakh metric tonnes. Large-scale reforms, he said, “cannot be delivered overnight”, adding that several existing bottlenecks were “legacy issues inherited from previous govts”.He said the steady rise in cultivated land and the growing number of paddy farmers added further strain on the system, but the govt was addressing these concerns in phases. Pujari also criticised the opposition for “running away from debate” and said an all-party meeting convened to resolve the impasse made no progress. The govt, he reiterated, was fully prepared for an open discussion inside the House.Meanwhile, senior BJD members, including deputy leader of opposition Prasanna Acharya, vice-president Debi Prasad Mishra and Sanjay Das Burma, announced that a massive protest will be held on Tuesday against what they alleged were policies hurting farmers. Acharya said the procurement process this year was chaotic, from registration to token distribution to mandi operations. Citing official figures, he said 19.66 lakh farmers registered, but around 1.5 lakh registrations were cancelled. Against a production of 193.06 lakh metric tonnes of paddy, procurement so far stands at only 60.09 lakh metric tonnes — about 31%.Mishra said district-level protests were under way since Feb 2 and will culminate in a major demonstration at Lower PMG here. Das Burma accused the BJP govt of reneging on its election promise of purchasing rice at MSP without deductions.
