Hyderabad: The Rohini Karthe – the traditional marker for when farmers begin preparing their fields for the Kharif season – falls on May 24. But across Telangana, thousands of farmers are still waiting at Paddy Procurement Centres (PPC), their grain weighed and receipts in hand, with nowhere to go until the lorries come. The Kharif season is two days away even as the Rabi harvest has not been fully lifted yet.
Over the past several weeks, farmers have staged blockades on highways and burned paddy bags at PPCs across multiple districts. The protests are not new. What they expose, however, is a procurement system that has been leaking at the same joints across successive governments, regardless of who sits in power in Telangana.
The lorry problem
At the heart of most complaints is a simple, stubborn bottleneck – the lorries are not coming fast enough.
Once paddy is weighed at a PPC, it must be transported by a contractor-operated lorry directly to the rice mill assigned to that specific lot. Until the lorry makes the round trip, from PPC to mill and back, the next farmer in the queue just has to wait. In busy procurement seasons, that wait can stretch from 15 to 40 days, according to farmers and field workers who have been documenting the delays.
T Sagar, general secretary of the Telangana Rythu Sangham, told Siasat.com that the problem does not end with the wait at the PPC. At the procurement centre itself, anywhere between two to three kg of paddy is deducted from every 40 kg bag, ostensibly to account for wastage during weighing. Then, once the paddy reaches the rice mill, the miller deducts another two to three kg per bag citing wastage during milling.
“As per established norms, not more than 600 grams can be deducted per bag,” Sagar told Siasat.com. “But what is actually being deducted is four to six times that amount.”
The geography of the problem makes it worse. Paddy lifted from Khammam may be assigned to a rice mill in Karimnagar. If the miller there insists on additional deductions, the farmer has little choice but to travel to Karimnagar to negotiate. Or simply comply.
Big farmers find workaround, small farmers cannot
Some farmers with larger holdings in Khammam have found a way to bypass the queue entirely. They shift their paddy directly from their fields to rice mills, bypassing the PPC altogether. The cost of this shortcut is steep, surrendering 10 kg of paddy per quintal to the miller. It is a loss they can afford to absorb. However, most farmers cannot.
“The onus falls on the farmer, who has to stay with his paddy load for as many as 15 days – from thrashing areas to PPCs to the mills,” Sagar told Siasat.com. For marginal and small farmers, that means 15 days away from their fields, their families and the next season’s preparation.
Officials say protests are pre-planned
District officials, however, push back on the narrative of systemic failure.
Gopi Krishna, District Manager of the Civil Supplies Corporation in Siddipet, told Siasat.com that while there was initially a problem with lorries, it had since been resolved. “In Dubbak and Pullur, there is no issue. Three vehicles have gone, loaded and are at the unloading point,” he said, adding that the protests in those mandals were “pre-planned” and concentrated near PPCs located close to highways.
He also attributed part of the problem to farmers being unwilling to clean their paddy before weighing. “There are 580 manual cleaning machines and 163 automatic cleaning machines stationed at 427 PPCs across the district,” he said. Of the 4 lakh tonne targeted for procurement in Siddipet, 2 lakh tonne had been procured and 1.8 lakh tonne unloaded at mills by Tuesday, May 19.
Gopi Krishna said the remaining stock, including around 50,000 tonne of paddy still lying in thrashing areas, would be cleared within 15 days. He added that a control room had been set up to continuously monitor the procurement process and that daily video conferencing review meetings were being held with revenue, civil supplies and other officials attending.
In Mahabubabad – one of the districts where protests have been most frequent – District Supplies Officer Gattu Narsing Rao said 82,000 tonne had been procured and the remaining 50,000 to 60,000 tonne would follow within 15 days. On a specific incident at Vasaram Thanda in Narasimhulapet mandal, where farmers alleged that weighed paddy had gone missing from a storage area and burned a bag in protest, Rao told Siasat.com that based on his information, the farmers had only burned wastage material.
Different crop but same problem
What is unfolding with paddy is also playing out with maize and jowar, procured by the Telangana Cooperative Marketing Federation Ltd (TG MARKFED).
Maize cultivation in Telangana has surged dramatically this Rabi season, from 9.11 lakh acres last year to 16.36 lakh acres. At the start of the Rabi marketing season, there were serious apprehensions about whether the state government would procure maize at all. It was only after farmers protested that the government ordered MARKFED to step in and procure maize and jowar.
Part of the reason lies in collapsing groundnut prices. At the start of the Rabi marketing season, there were serious apprehensions about whether the state government would procure maize at all. It was only after farmers protested that the government ordered MARKFED to step in and procure maize and jowar.
Nagarkurnool and Wanaparthy, known for their groundnut, fetched only Rs 5,000 to Rs 6,000 per quintal last Rabi, which was down from highs of Rs 12,000 to Rs 14,000 a few years ago.
Many farmers in these districts pivoted to maize as a result. Statewide, meanwhile, the area under groundnut cultivation has seen a sharp increase, from 70,034 acre in Rabi 2025 to 2,04,621 acre in Rabi 2026, suggesting broader crop-level shifts are reshaping Telangana’s agricultural map.
But the state’s procurement apparatus has not kept pace with the shift. MARKFED has capped procurement at 26 quintal per acre for maize and 10 quintal per acre for jowar. Farmers, Sagar says, are getting yields of 40 quintal per acre for maize and 20 quintal per acre for jowar.
The surplus of 14 quintals of maize and 10 quintals of jowar per acre must be sold in the open market, where prices run Rs 500 to Rs 800 below the Minimum Support Price (MSP) of Rs 2,400 per quintal. “If a farmer has cultivated maize in five acres, he will have to bear a loss of Rs 50,000 to Rs 60,000,” Sagar told Siasat.com.
Once bitten, twice shy
The recurring failure to honour MSP commitments has made farmers wary of official encouragement to diversify crops.
In 2016, then chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao urged farmers to move away from cotton and grow red gram, green gram and black gram, promising MSP of Rs 10,000 per quintal. Seminars were held, officials followed through on outreach – and then the MSP assurance was quietly dropped.
The same pattern holds for oilseeds. Oil palm cultivation has received sustained state encouragement for six years. Safflower cultivation has increased this Rabi season in Sangareddy, Vikarabad and Rangareddy, but there is no state incentive for farmers growing it. Sunflower and sesamum are in a similar position. The area under vegetable and fruit cultivation in Telangana is, by most accounts, shrinking.
Compounding the structural problems is climate change. Sudden hailstorms, strong winds and unseasonal rains have become a recurring feature of April and May in Telangana, turning the final stretch of the harvest season into an unpredictable risk for farmers and procurement officials alike. Agricultural experts have been urging a shift toward crop varieties with shorter lifespans, from sowing to harvest, as one way to reduce exposure to these weather events.
“Unless the government gives an assurance and incentives for crop diversification, as promised in the Congress’ 2023 election manifesto, which assured a bonus for six crops and MSP for four, farmers will not be motivated,” Sagar told Siasat.com. He points to Kerala, where the state government has committed MSP to 16 varieties of vegetables and fruits, intervening to compensate farmers when market prices fall short.
What needs to change
Sagar’s recommendations are that the state government should act against lorry contractors who cause delays, cancelling contracts and blacklisting repeat offenders. The Civil Supplies Department should crack down on rice millers who do not deliver milled rice to the Food Corporation of India (FCI) on time and instead sell it in the open market. Millers should also be prevented from making unauthorised deductions when paddy is unloaded at their premises.
On Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy’s claim that 80 per cent of paddy, approximately 45 lakh tonne, had been procured as of Thursday, May 21, Sagar had a pointed question. The state’s own production estimate for Rabi 2026 is 90 lakh tonne. When does the government expect to procure the other half?
The question hangs over a procurement season that was already running late. With the Kharif sowing window opening in two days, the farmers still stuck at procurement centres are being asked, in effect, to choose between this harvest and the next one. “Fortunately, except in some places, there haven’t been any major extreme weather events since last month,” Sagar said — a small mercy in an otherwise difficult season.
| Posted by Vivek Bhoomi | | 
