Telangana urges CCI to lift restrictions on cotton procurement

Hyderabad: The State government has asked the Cotton Corporation of India (CCI) to not to impose a limit on the procurement of cotton stocks as it might create fear among the farmers of not getting the minimum support price (MSP). Agriculture Minister S Niranjan Reddy has written a letter to the CCI chairman in this regard on Tuesday.

The letter was written following the CCI asking its officials to procure only 15,000 bales in the Warangal-Mahbubnagar region and 10,000 bales in Adilabad region during the ongoing procurement season.

The Minister asked the CCI to not to trouble farmers by imposing restrictions on procurement. He said the farmers have been bringing their cotton to proceed to the CCI procurement centres as they have done last year. However, the CCI had instructed its officials at the centres to impose limitations on the quantity of cotton that they can lift.

The Minister, in his letter, said that it was a critical time for the farmers and asked the CCI to immediately remove all restrictions on procurement till the end of January 2021.

Adding that there was no problem at the procurement centres where there was enough storage capacity, he assured to send farmers bringing cotton to the procurement centres lacking storing space to the centres with the storage capacity. Against this backdrop, he said that it was not necessary to limit the quantities of procurement.

Niranjan Reddy said that imposing limits on the quantity of procurement might trigger panic among farmers of not getting MSP for their produce.