Chhatrapur: In a bid to ensure transparency and check irregularities in paddy procurement, the Ganjam administration has decided to examine if the farmers having registered their names for paddy sale have land in their names or not.
Besides, their bank accounts, if inactive or active, will also be checked well before the paddy procurement.
A decision to this effect came at a review meeting on the preparedness for paddy procurement at Chhatrapur Wednesday. The meeting was presided over by ADM Kabindranath Sahu through video-conferencing.
It was learnt that 1,34, 462 new farmers had registered their names for paddy procurement in fiscal 2019-20.
In the current fiscal, the total number of farmers having registered their names is 1, 39, 648. Of them, 20, 567 have newly registered names while 1, 19, 081 have renewed their registrations for the current year.
The bank accounts of 492 farmers have been blocked while the cases of eight others are under consideration.
Amid allegations of irregularities of non-farmers pushing paddy in procurement system, the ADM directed revenue inspectors, amins and VLWs to investigate if the registered famers own lands and do paddy cultivation and prepare a report.
Doubts were raised in some quarters over lands where paddy was claimed to have been cultivated. These cases will be under scanner.
A list of registered farmers was put on the public domain. It was alleged that some farmers had in fact less land against the volume of land shown in the list.
Marketing inspectors had been directed to tally details of the farmers in the list.
The meeting discussed steps to identify unfit farmland, increasing the number of cooperative societies to be involved in paddy procurement and setting the anomalies in the bank accounts of registered farmers right.
The review meeting was attended by Chhatrapur sub-collector Priyaranjan Prusty, district civil supplies officer Umashankar Pati, additional district civil supplies officer Brajendra Kumar Mohanty, civil supplies officer Puspa Munda, and assistant registrar of cooperative societies (Berhmapur division) Biswaranjan Das, district agriculture officer Bhaskar Padhy and district information and public relations officer Rabinarayan Behera.
PNN