Bhubaneswar: In spite of tall promises by the Odisha government to encourage vegetable farming in the state by building adequate infrastructure for storing and marketing the produce, the reality is vastly different as experienced from sky-rocketing prices at times and distress sales of crops at others.
The root cause of the wild swing in prices, however, boils down to Odisha’s dependence on other states since most of the vegetables produced here are forced to go for distress sale during harvesting season in absence of proper storage and marketing facilities.
According to data presented by Finance Minister Niranjan Pujari in the Assembly Wednesday, out of the 128 cold storages in the state, only 48 are operational while remaining 80 are lying defunct.
Replying to a question asked by Pipli MLA Pradeep Maharathy in the Assembly, the minister said that efforts are on to revive the defunct cold storages. Furthermore, power is being provided to the cold storages at subsidised prices under Potato Mission, Pujari told the House.
Curiously, it was Maharathy who was the agriculture minister in the last term of BJD. He had promised repair of existing cold storages and construction of new ones in PPP mode. The plan, however, did not see much success owing to lack of interest from private players.
