Farm leaders seek fresh survey of crop damage in UP's Pilibhit

PILIBHIT: In the wake of the recent spell of heavy rainfall that caused widespread destruction of paddy and sugarcane crops across Uttar Pradesh, the commissioner of Bareilly division, Sanyukta Samaddar, said that the assessment done by revenue department has revealed that the damage to crops in Pilibhit district is around Rs 4.5 crore. However, the farmer leaders have raised the issue of extensive damage to several farmers in the district and the need for the survey to be conducted again. They have demanded a resurvey claiming that the loss due to crop damage is over Rs 100 crore.
Gurdayal Singh of village Kataiyya, a farmer leader who claimed to have lost over 20% of his paddy crops in the rainfall, slammed the state government for its promptness in satellite monitoring of crop residues' burning but lack of use of technology in assessing the damage to crops. "We have incurred heavy loss due to the incessant rainfall. Had the state government been fair enough in its intentions, the manual survey of the damage would not have been conducted," he said.
More than 1,300 villages across 18 districts have been affected by floods in UP due to incessant rainfall this month.
Meanwhile, the acting state president of Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) in UP, Manjit Singh, has called a meeting with farmers at Neuria town in Pilibhit on October 28 to raise this issue. He said the gathering of farmers would also be addressed by half a dozen MLAs of the opposition parties. "I have fixed a meeting with UP government's chief secretary, Durga Shanker Mishra, on October 29 to seek resurvey of the crop damage caused due to heavy rains in the state. If our demand is not met, we will then hold a state-wide agitation," he said.
Singh said, "In Pilibhit, the paddy crops have been cultivated in an area of 1.35 lakh hectares this year. The farmers normally harvest at least 50 quintals of paddy a hectare meaning thereby that the total produce would have been on par with 6750000 quintals if the weather conditions had been normal. If the average damage to crop is assessed at merely 7%, although the actual loss was much higher, it comes to 47200 quintals of paddy which is valued at Rs 96.39 crore at the minimum support price (MSP) of Rs 2040. The damage to other crops including the sugarcane is an additional loss to farmers."
Samaddar, however, claimed that the revenue teams reached out to every affected agricultural field and "the survey of the damage was done in a fair manner."