Congress’ Shaktisinh Gohil claimed the inspection report had stated that despite availability of grants, liquid diet was not given to the babies admitted at the hospital. (Source: PTI photo ) Congress’ Shaktisinh Gohil claimed the inspection report had stated that despite availability of grants, liquid diet was not given to the babies admitted at the hospital. (Source: PTI photo ) Waving a letter purportedly written by NAFED, refusing to procure pulses and oilseeds from Gujarat “for not following the standard operating procedure for safe storage of procured stock”, the Congress on Saturday slammed the BJP government in the state, saying that it could lead to distress sale by farmers resulting in huge losses to them. Addressing mediapersons, senior Congress leader Shaktisinh Gohil said that with NAFED “not going to procure the produce at the minimum support price(MSP)”, farmers would be forced to sell their Kharif produce to traders who would pay low price to them taking advantage of the situation and this would lead to huge losses to farmers. “Who will be responsible for the losses and plight of the farmers in such a situation that has arisen owing to adulteration in groundnut stocks and fire in some of the groundnut godowns where groundnut purchased at MSP by agencies approved by the NAFED were stored,” he asked. In the letter purportedly sent to the Agriculture Ministry two days ago, NAFED — the apex national agriculture cooperative organisation for procurement of agricultural produce — refused to procure pulses and oilseeds from Gujarat this year owing to circumstances that led to adulteration in groundnut stocks and incidents of fire at groundnut godowns a few months ago. NAFED purportedly cited “paucity of scientific warehouses’’ in Gujarat and “the Gujarat State Warehousing Corporation (GSWC) not following the standard operating procedure for safe storage of procured stock’’. The central cooperative agency also asked the Gujarat government “to assign the task of procurement in the state to other procuring agencies approved by the government’’. “Incidents of fire in some of the godowns and adulteration of stocks in one of the godowns is also reported, which indicates that proper care and safety measures have not been taken by the GSWC,” the purported letter of NAFED stated. The letter stated, “The organisation (GSWC) suffers from acute shortage of trained manpower and the godowns hired by them are often far from the procuring areas and in some cases, the agencies had to cover over 300 km for warehousing’’. “Moreover, it is not possible for NAFED to verify the scientific appropriateness of the storage godowns as we (NAFED) do not have any expertise in this area. It would be better to task CWC or any other such agency to do the same before the procurement is undertaken,” stated the letter. NAFED purportedly also alleged in the letter that the Gujarat government has not been able to keep its commitment of utilising stock of last year’s procured groundnut under the public distribution system, and 3.37 metric tonnes of it is still lying for disposal in godowns. The purported letter stated that NAFED is undertaking procurement of pulses and oilseeds in Rajasthan, MP, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Harayana and UP. For all the latest Ahmedabad News, download Indian Express App

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