Sugarcane farmers stage protest in Madurai over non-payment of dues | Madurai News

MADURAI:

Sugarcane farmers

in

Madurai

district staged a protest in the city demanding their long pending dues from the

Tamil Nadu

government and private sugar factories.

The farmers alleged that the factories had kept their payment on sugarcane procured from them on due for the last four years. They charged that private sugar factories owed Rs 1,384 crore to them (all farmers in the state) while government sugar factories should give them Rs 238 crore.

Sugarcane farmers supplying their cane to Alanganallur National Cooperative Sugar Mills and private mills in the locality staged the protest at Anna Nagar demanding their dues and raised slogans against government.

They said the government was not pressurising private sugar mills to give away the pending due and refuse to announce the State Advisory Price (SAP) on sugarcane till now, though the grinding season is about to start. They expressed their displeasure over state government proposing to implement revenue sharing formula.

State president of Tamil Nadu Sugarcane Farmers Association N Palanisamy said state government was keen on implementing the revenue sharing formula proposed by the C Rangarajan committee on decontrol of the sugar industry. As per the recommendations, farmers will get 70 % share and 30% share out of sales of total sugar produced from the sugarcane supplied by farmers.

The tricky part is that sugar content recovery rate is roughly 8 % in Tamil Nadu. "Out of 1 tonne of sugarcane, 80 to 85 kilograms of sugar could be produced when recovery rate is 8 %. When the sugar is sold in wholesale price, we may get hardly Rs 2,100 per tonne which is not remunerative for sugarcane farming", Palanisamy explained.

Last year, SAP was Rs 2,750. So sugarcane farmers were against this revenue sharing formula though it appeared remunerative to sugarcane farmers in Karnataka and Maharashtra where recovery rate was above 13%, he said.

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November 29, 2017 at 11:17AM