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Our Bureau

Thiruvananthapuram, July 12 The Kerala Government has denied having received from the Centre an additional 19,000 tonnes of rice for distribution among Above Poverty Line (APL) cardholders.

The office of the Minister of Food and Civil Supplies also denied reports about the Centre sanctioning Rs 52.48 crore to the State Civil Supplies Corporation (Supplyco) for market intervention during Onam.

In a statement here, the Minister’s office said the State had not received any additional bulk allotment and that the amount of Rs 52.48 crore mentioned was the money due to Supplyco for paddy procurement undertaken during 2008-09.

The State’s APL rice quota till March, 2008, was 1.13 lakh tonnes a month. Beginning April 2008, the quota was slashed to 17,056 tonnes.

Even this quota was withheld from August 2008, to January 2009, on the ground that the State had not supplied its share of rice to the Central pool. The Centre relented only after the Chief Minister himself led an agitation in New Delhi to press the demand.

In January 2009, the Centre sanctioned an additional allotment of 19,000 tonnes of rice taking the State’s monthly quota to 30,000 tonnes. This continued till March 2009.

All that the Centre had done in April was to convert this additionally allotted 19,000 tonnes of rice into the State’s additional monthly quota, the statement said.

Similarly, the Rs 52.48 crore that the Centre is stated to have sanctioned to Supplyco was the compensation for the paddy it had procured from April 2008, to March 2009, and given to the Central pool as rice.

The Corporation had earlier raised this amount as a loan from the Corporation Bank for paying the paddy cultivators.

The Centre owed the State Rs 90.75 crore towards the price of the 1.35 lakh tonnes of rice supplied to the Central pool between April, 2008, and March, 2009. The State Government had submitted a bill for this amount to the Centre on April 7, 2009.

More Stories on : Rice | Social Welfare | Kerala

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