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Sunday, Mar 23, 2008
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Government gears up to meet situation

Girish Menon

Mullakkara Ratnakaran

Thiruvananthapuram: With the unprecedented summer rain acquiring the proportion of a natural calamity threatening to swamp the entire agriculture sector, the State government announced a series of fresh district and State-level measures to meet the situation.

Agriculture Minister Mullakkara Ratnakaran told The Hindu on Saturday that monitoring cells would be established in Alappuzha, Kottayam, Thrissur, and Malappuram districts headed by respective District Collectors to take calls from distressed farmers affected by the rain.

Mr. Ratnakaran said the monitoring cells would seek to sort out issues related to breaking of bunds, pumping of water, power failure reported from the affected areas. District-level officials of the Revenue, Agriculture, Irrigation, Civil Supplies and the Kerala State Electricity Board would be members of the cells. The Disaster Management Committee, under the Revenue Department, would function as the nodal agency to sort issues that could not be resolved at district levels.

Mr. Ratnakaran said there were several areas where land resurvey was on. Farmers in these areas would become ineligible because of their inability to produce tax receipts. Kudumbasree would also not be eligible for aid for the large tract which it was cultivating under contract farming. These issues would be tackled at the State level, he said.

A high-level meeting, convened by Mr. Ratnakaran, also set up a committee, with the Agriculture Production Commissioner K. Jayakumar as convener and Principal Secretaries of Revenue, Finance and Civil Supplies Department as members, to formulate liberal norms that would reach out to the farmers in providing relief over and above the usual formula adopted in ordinary cases.

Mr. Ratnakaran said that with the rain threatening to be a natural calamity affecting the agriculture sector, the meeting decided to calculate the losses to other crops including vegetables.

He said the meeting, attended by senior officials, evaluated the impact of the rain on paddy cultivators, who, it estimated, suffered a loss of Rs.82 crore.

The Agriculture Minister said that his department had provided the latest figures on the losses to the Centre, besides convincing it about the impact it was having on the agriculture sector. He said that the State government had sought an appointment with the Union Agriculture Minister, Home Minister and the Defence Minister on Monday.

If the appointment materialised , Revenue Minister K.P. Rajendran would leave for New Delhi from Hyderabad, the venue of the CPI’s national conference. Mr. Rajendran confirmed that he would be in Delhi on Monday to take up the issue with the Centre.

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