Endless extensions in procurement deadlines are helping traders rather than farmers, Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said here on Monday.

“Farmers sold their stocks soon after the harvest; it’s traders who bought pulses from farmers at prices below the Minimum Support Price and are selling to us or the State governments,” Paswan told mediapersons at a press conference to mark three years of the NDA Government.

“Farmers sell their produce maximum by February,” he said, adding that many State governments requested the Centre to extend the procurement deadlines several times and the last extension ended on April 22.

According to the Minister, pulses procured by the Department of Consumers Affairs to help consumers in the light of soaring prices last year have become a liability as prices have fallen subsequently.

Till mid-April, the Department had built a buffer stock of 20 lakh mt (MT) by buying 16.27 lakh MT from domestic farmers and importing 3.79 lakh MT from abroad. As much as 14.71 lakh MT of pulses were procured during the previous Kharif marketing season, he said.

The government’s plan to link ration cards and beneficiary records with Aadhaar has resulted in the cancellation of as many as 2.33 crore fake ration cards.

Nearly 78 per cent of the total of 17.99 crore ration cards have been seeded with Aadhaar so far. This has helped the Government to bring down food subsidies to about ₹14,000 crore as targeted in the 2016-17 fiscal. Among the States that had a large number of fictitious ration cards were Maharashtra and Jharkhand.

As part of the e-payment push, nearly 39 per cent of 5,26,377 Fair Price (FP) shops in the country have Point of Sale machines. Besides, nearly 10 per cent of FP shops in States and Union Territories are equipped to handle other modes of digital payments, Paswan said.

Paswan said the direct benefit transfer (DBT) scheme under which a food subsidy is directly credited to beneficiary accounts has already been implemented in Chandigarh, PUducherryand Dadra & Nagar Haveli.

The government is in the process of looking into complaints received in these UTs, where the initiative was launched as a pilot.