Punjab: Floods, fake grain and failed support

This year’s paddy harvesting season in Punjab began under a cloud of despair. Floodwaters inundated nearly every district, inflicting widespread crop damage. Neighbouring Haryana too faced similar devastation. With the monsoon stretching longer than usual, experts, including those at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, warned of a 15 to 20 per cent drop in paddy production.

Yet, defying expectations, a totally different picture emerged once procurement began. Record after record started tumbling. Paddy arrivals in mandis soon began to overwhelm the market infrastructure. Several mandis ran short of basic storage materials like gunny bags. Procurement targets were not only achieved but were exceeded and that too well ahead of schedule — only for the process to suddenly stall, leaving many farmers stranded outside the mandis with unsold produce.

To make sense of this paradox, one must look closely at Punjab’s three most flood-affected districts. In Amritsar, for instance, officials reported complete crop loss on 61,256 acres. Yet, by early November the Food Corporation of India had procured 3.02 lakh metric tonnes, up from last year’s 2.98 lakh metric tonnes.

A similar story unfolded in Fazilka and Tarn Taran. In Fazilka, floods destroyed standing paddy across 33,123 acres, but procurement matched last year’s 2.14 lakh metric tonnes. Tarn Taran saw 23,308 acres submerged, but procurement rose to 9.29 lakh metric tonnes against 9.02 lakh metric tonnes last year.

The same pattern extended across Haryana, where government agencies completed their targets by the first week of November, procuring five lakh metric tonnes more than last year. The sudden halt left farmers still waiting in line with little choice but to sell to private traders at distress prices.

The contradictions in these numbers — and the stories they conceal — raise troubling questions about the opacity of the procurement system itself.

A plausible theory points to the illicit influx of cheap paddy from Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan where the paddy markets are underdeveloped compared to Punjab and Haryana and farmers often have to sell at lower prices. If this cross-border movement of grain indeed took place, it could not have happened without the active collusion of traders and middlemen at multiple levels.

To curb such malpractice, the Haryana government had set up an online system called ‘Meri Fasal, Mera Byora’, that required farmers to obtain a market gate pass linked to their cultivable land before selling their produce. Officially, no paddy could enter a mandi without this pass.

But loopholes soon appeared. Typically, one acre yields around 25 quintals of paddy, yet gate passes were being issued for up to 35 quintals per acre — an inflated figure that conveniently allowed room for the unloading of additional grain possibly from other states.

Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) president Gurnam Singh Chaduni claims that land unfit for paddy was registered on the portal to obtain fake passes for outside grain. Reports of forged gate passes surfaced as well. By the time the government tried to plug the loophole by replacing gate passes with QR-coded passes, the procurement season was nearly over.

The government was eventually compelled to ban the inflow of paddy from other states. But did this actually resolve the problem? The ban applied only to the import of paddy, not rice.

Farmer leaders in Haryana allege that traders have exploited this loophole — buying rice from other states, showing it on paper as paddy, and immediately selling it in government mandis.

Local farmer organisations in Karnal first exposed the scam, triggering political outcry and formation of a Special Investigation Team. However, as the inquiry progressed, a similar pattern was detected across multiple districts. Chaduni has since demanded that the case be handed over to the CBI.

Leader of the Opposition and former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda has called it a scam “worth thousands of crores” and alleged that “more paddy has been purchased than what the state actually produces, and yet many farmers have not been paid the Minimum Support Price”.

In Punjab, attempts by farmers to take matters into their hands triggered new friction. Incidents of local farmers intercepting and turning back paddy-laden trucks arriving from Rajasthan at the Rajpura–Patli border in Fazilka were met with Rajasthan’s farmers blocking cotton trucks coming from Punjab. Since cotton fetches better prices in Rajasthan’s markets, many Punjab farmers sell their produce there. What began as a procurement scam soon escalated into an inter-state conflict between farming communities.

Punjab has filed an FIR related to the scam, and announced measures to ensure that procurement benefits local farmers only. Yet with procurement targets met and the FCI winding down operations, the action is regrettably late.

Farmers in Punjab and Haryana — already reeling from floods and falling yields — have borne the heaviest losses at a time when they most needed support.