Almost 90 per cent of Odisha’s farm produce is paddy. But paddy procurement has always been a sticky problem for successive governments. Every year farmers would block roads and shout slogans because their paddy hadn’t been picked up. Politicians joined them and together they would bring all traffic to a grinding halt.
Many times farmers slept on their sacks of paddy in the mandi (market yard), waiting for the elusive miller or agricultural cooperative society representative to turn up and at least weigh their produce. “Every year payment to farmers for their paddy would. . .
