The announcement of minimum support price for chillis made by the Centre, thanks to the initiative taken by Union minister for urban development and information and broadcasting M Venkaiah Naidu, seems to have failed to impress both Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu and his Telangana counterpart K Chandrasekhar Rao.
Though Venkaiah thought it would give a lot of political mileage to the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Telugu states, it has in fact boomeranged on it.
First of all, the announcement of MSP of Rs 5,000 per quintal with additional rebate of Rs 1200 came very late, after the farmers forced to sell 70 per cent of the stock to traders at throwaway price. Since the support price cannot be paid with retrospective effect, it will hardly help them.
Secondly, the MSP for chillis is very meagre, as against the demand of Rs 8,000 per quintal by farmers.
Thirdly, the purchase would be done only till May 31 and if there are any losses, it would be shared equally by the Central Government and the State Governments. But, the loss is limited to 25 per cent of the procurement price, including the permissible overhead charges.
And fourthly, the Centre and the state agencies would purchase only 88,300 MTs of Red Chilli in Andhra Pradesh and 33,700 MTs in Telangana under the scheme.
This was not taken kindly by both Naidu and KCR. Naidu felt that the chilli farmers should be given at least Rs 8000 rupees per quintal. He stated that if the MSP is less than rupees 8,000 per quintal, the state government is providing a bonus of rupees 1,500. He wanted the central government to share the additional 1500 charge equally.
On the other hand, Telangana marketing minister T Harish Rao slammed the Centre for its delayed response and said that state government wrote a letter on March 31 demanding purchase of chilli at Rs 7000 per quintal. He termed the MIP scheme as “Joke of the Millennium”.
He said the centre asked the state to procure only 33,000 MT of best quality Chilli at Rs. 5,000 per quintal while the state has 7 lakh tonnes of chilli. The best quality is already fetching Rs 6000 per quintal and questioned about the low-quality chilli.
