Highway blocked in Phagwara, Jalandhar over tardy procurement

Protesting tardy paddy procurement, farmers blocked a stretch of the Amritsar-Ludhiana national highway in Phagwara as well as the Dhanowali railway crossing on the outskirts of Jalandhar, resulting in inconvenience to commuters, on Monday.
The protest at Dhanowali was lifted at around 6 pm. In Phagwara, the farmers under the banner of Bhartiya Kisan Union (Doaba) decided to keep the road blocked for an indefinite period.
The police have diverted the traffic going towards Jalandhar and Ludhiana through other routes, such as Mehli-Banga-Khothran road to Goraya, and that coming from Ludhiana via Phillaur-Nurmahal route. The army convoy remained stationed in Jalandhar for multiple hours.
BKU (Doaba) district president Manjit Singh Rai said their paddy crop was being neither procured nor lifted from the mandis. “We have brought a large number of trolleys laden with unsold paddy to prove our point. We will continue the blockade till purchase of paddy begins in the mandis,” he said.
Tendering an apology to the commuters for the inconvenience caused by the blockade during the festive season, another farmer leader, Satnam Singh Sahni, said the Central and state governments forced them to take this step. “Ambulances and schoolchildren were being allowed to pass,” Sahni said.
Senior officials, including Kapurthala senior superintendent of police Vatsala Gupta, are camping on the spot to oversee the situation.
One of the reasons behind the tardy procurement is the short-duration paddy variety, PR126, which is projected as the solution to Punjab’s falling water table, as it is not finding favour with rice millers who are apprehensive about its out-turn ratio. They say that these may have been mixed with hybrid varieties. Of about 5,500 rice millers in the state, only 10% have agreed to shell the PR126 variety rice, with others stating that the low out-turn ratio would lead to losses for the millers at the time of handing over to the Food Corporation of India (FCI). They said due to mixing with hybrid varieties, the out-turn ratio is likely to be around 62%, which, according to norms, should be 67%.
Chief minister Bhagwant Singh Mann had on Saturday said that the state would not bow before the “blackmailing tactics of forces trying to derail the paddy procurement”. He had also said that the state was ready to get milling of rice done from outside of state.