Chandigarh, June 15

The Food Corporation of India has once again started accepting rice from the mills where physical verification has been completed.

In a letter issued today, the FCI District Officers have been instructed to start accepting custom milled rice from those rice shellers where the physical verification had been completed. The delivery of rice had been stopped by the FCI from June 1, pending the physical verification of the paddy and rice stocks in each mill.

The FCI had ordered physical verification following complaints of pilferage of rice meant to be delivered to the agency and a mismatch in stocks. Punjab had procured 203 lakh metric tonnes of paddy in the Kharif Marketing Season 2020-21. This was way beyond the productivity of the land under paddy cultivation could give, raising suspicion that there had been bogus billing of paddy. — TNS