400 rice millers in Punjab up the ante, seek Rs 277 cr aid

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 15

As many as 400 rice mill owners in Punjab, whose mills have been lying shut for the past 11 years due to their inability to return prescribed rice from substandard paddy variety given to them for milling by the government, have decided to launch an ‘agitation’.

Most of these owners going through financial crisis have been forced to either undertake some odd jobs or take to other trades, after selling off the land and machinery. Since many of them claim to have availed loans from financial institutions to start their rice mills, they said they were still repaying loans from their meagre earnings.

‘Will consider issue’

The matter was brought to my notice recently. I will look into it. —Gurkirat Kirpal Singh, Food & Supplies department secretary

“We are at the receiving end due to the government policy, which declared us as the defaulters. The government promoted the cultivation of a substandard variety of paddy (Paddy 201) between 2007-08 to 2009-10,” said the aggrieved millers. They said, “As the government did not want to upset the powerful farmer lobby, this paddy was procured and sent to our rice mills for milling in 2008 and in 2009. We realised that this had high breakage and the milled rice had a reddish tinge. The outturn ratio (recovery of rice) was much less than 67 per cent specified by the government. It was just around 55 per cent.”

The millers were here recently to meet officials in the Food Department and urged them to compensate them for losses incurred by them during the past 11 years.

Davinder Bansal, who had started a rice mill in Malerkotla, just before this paddy was assigned to him, said he suffered huge losses. He said he was accused of not being able to meet the outturn ratio of rice. “My mill, like other mills, was blacklisted and no paddy was assigned to my mill thereafter. I am now forced to move to Delhi and take up a job to make both ends meet and repay the loan,” he said.

Vijay Jindal, a rice miller from Dhuri, said the government should compensate them for their losses and allow them to restart their milling operations. “An 11-member committee of the IAS officers was constituted by the Government of India in 2010, which had declared that the paddy variety was of poor quality. This variety was subsequently banned by the government. A compensation of Rs 277 crore was also announced for the millers by the Centre, but state government has not released it,” Jindal lamented.

Interestingly, an FIR was registered against officials of two state procurement agencies in 2019. Manpreet Singh Dhillon, a rice mill owner from Nabha, who was the complainant in this case, said there’s no headway in the investigations even after two years.