Hyderabad: Rice millers in Telangana state are minting money out of rice stocks meant for public distribution system.
Though the millers are supposed to hand over custom-milled rice (CMR) stocks to the government within 15 days, they failed to do so even after the deadline was extended by more than a year.
Instead, they are earning crores by supplying those rice stocks to districts within the state and neighbouring states.
Since, most of the rice millers enjoy political clout, the government too is not initiating any action against them.
The government gets the rice for PDS by two ways, namely custom-milled rice and levy rice.
In CMR, the government purchases husked rice from farmers and then allocates it to mills for processing for a fixed charge and rebuys again from them.
In the levy rice policy, millers are allowed to sell a certain percentage of rice (25 to 70 per cent) procured by them in the open market, while the remaining (called levy rice) is collected by government agencies at a minimum support price (MSP).
Millers in Nalgonda, Karimnagar, Nizamabad, Warangal and Adilabad have not handed over rice stocks to government for the last one years.
“Around 75,000 metric tonnes of rice stocks are yet to be received by the government. If they fail the deadline of December 31, we will raid the mills and book cases against them,” said C. Parthasarathy, the commissioner for civil supplies.
He added that rice millers cite power shortage as the reason for not completing milling of rice.
“This could be one of the reasons, but at the same time cannot be an excuse for delaying rice supplies. There are complaints that the millers are sending those stocks to open market,” Mr Parthasarathy added.
However, T. Devender Reddy, president of Telangana Rice Millers Association refuted the complaint.
“None of the rice mills could run to their full capacity due to severe power shortage for the last one year. We have to also meet milling of levy rice quota,” Mr Reddy explained.
