Recently, there has been much criticism about some farmers selling wheat at the FCI silos constructed by the Adani group. Why did the farmers do so? Are they disloyal to their cause? Here are some clarifications:
• The silos would have to be declared deemed mandi yards for buying produce, and the wheat is bought by FCI, who has rented these from the business group. Most of the produce bought by any state procurement agency ultimately goes to FCI anyway.
• The smaller mandi yards are often opened on the insistence of the local politician to earn some brownie points, regardless of logistics. There is no pucca plinth for dumping the grain, no crates for storage and no staff to oversee buying operations. Government inspectors are usually given two or even more mandis to manage. The arhtiyas or commission agents operate in more than one mandi. As a result, the farmer has to unload his grain on the kutcha ground, mostly made by clearing up a piece of unpaved land, which is open to flooding and damaging the grain in the event of rain. The farmer may have to wait long hours for the auction since it will begin only when the inspector and arhtiya reach the mandi after attending to the other mandis they operate in.
• The arhtiya rarely has enough tarpaulins or crates to protect the dumped grain from vagaries of the weather. The mandatory number of these articles is inadequate to begin with, and even that is not ensured by the mandi board. It’s not unlikely for the farmers’ grain to be dumped for two to four days in the mandi before the auction takes place, exposing it to the risk of getting wet in the event of rain, resulting in rejection due to high moisture content. There is obviously a lot that is not right with our mandis.
