Difficulties faced by farmers due to the Centre’s decisions forced upon States, particularly in availing the crop insurance and purchasing fertilizer through the new direct benefit transfer (DBT) system, figured prominently at District Collectors’ conference.
Apart from expressing doubts over the timely encashment of cheques issued by the State government under the investment support scheme, several Collectors were understood to have brought the issues in purchase of fertilizer and enrolment of crop loss within 48 hours of suffering the damage to the notice of the government.
Although Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao was learnt to have tried to allay their fears over timely encashment of investment support cheques at ₹4,000 per acre by stating that ₹6,000 crore was made available to banks in the State following a request to the Reserve Bank of India, the Collectors pointed out that the cash could be used for other needs by banks and by the time the investment support cheques land in the farmers hands there could still be cash problem.
Official sources stated that the linking of biometric system and Aadhaar with sale of fertilizer by the Centre was creating hardships to farmers and it could throw a major problem when the demand for fertilizer would be high during the commencement of the next farming season. There could be difficulty when lakhs of farmers make beeline to fertilizer shops to purchase crores of bags of soil nutrients through the biometric system.
Further, the Collectors had opined that the farming community was being denied the benefit of crop insurance scheme with the guidelines including applying on the crop loss within 48 hours of suffering the damage and getting an inspection of the affected field done by the representatives of the insurance companies concerned.
The farming community hardly have any awareness on such guidelines, it was felt.
Meanwhile, talking on Mission Bhagiratha, the Chief Minister Rao sought booking of cases against those who broke pipelines to draw water into their fields. He wanted the works completed in two months. Mr. Rao also instructed all district Collectors to examine forest revival, block and revenue plantation taken up under green belt improvement programme by the forest department in Siddipet, Gajwel and Komatibanda areas. He instructed all Collectors to inspect the work in the above areas on Sunday.
