Rains: UP farmers lament crop loss of 100cr; survey claims just 4.5cr

Pilibhit/ UP: While farmers in Uttar Pradesh's Pilibhit state that they sustained a loss of Rs 100 crore, a survey there by the commissioner of Bareilly division, Sanyukta Samaddar, claimed that damages tune to Rs 4.5 crore only, IANS reported.

In October, the state suffered heavy rainfall damages. More than 1,300 villages across 18 districts have been affected by floods, inundating farmlands and washing away crops.

After the commissioner's survey's loss estimate reached nowhere, even half of what farmers claimed, they started demanding a new survey to assess the losses.

A farmer leader said, "We have incurred heavy loss due to the incessant rainfall. If the state government had been fair enough in its intentions, the manual survey of the damage would not have been conducted."

Slamming the Yogi Adithyanath government in the state, he said that it was enthusiastic about satellite monitoring burning of crop residues but had no sufficient technology to assess the damage to crops.

The Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) has called a meeting with farmers at Neuria town in Pilibhit on October 28 to raise this issue.

RLD leader Manjit 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 per hectare, meaning thereby that the total produce would have been on par with 67,50,000 quintals if the weather conditions had been normal. If the average damage to crop is assessed at merely 7 per cent, although the actual loss was much higher, it comes to 47,200 quintals of paddy, which is valued at Rs 96.39 crore at the minimum support price (MSP) of Rs 2,040. The damage to other crops, including the sugarcane, is an additional loss to farmers."