Rice prod may drop by 30% this Kharif on monsoon blues

India may produce 30 per cent less rice this Kharif season at close to 60 million tonnes even if the monsoon revives this month, partially offsetting the huge deficit in sowing areas of the crop, say rice millers.    

India produced 84.58 million tonnes of rice in the 2008-09 Kharif season.    

"If monsoon recovers in the next 15 days, it will be just like a silver lining in dark clouds. But rice output may still decline by 30 per cent this Kharif. And if it doesn't rain, the production will dip further," Federation of All India Rice Millers Association Chief Executive Officer P C Kanodia said.    

 

Paddy acreage is already down by about 58 lakh hectares to 228.19 lakh hectares (LH) mainly due to less rain in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, according to the official data.     

Kanodia, who is also secretary of the UP Rice Millers Association, said the situation in Uttar Pradesh is worse than Punjab and Haryana, as irrigation facility in the country's most populous state is not up to the mark.     

Worse still, water levels in reservoirs are shrinking and the lack of electricity has made irrigation a tough task in the state, he said.     

The situation in West Bengal, a major paddy growing state, is not better either. Birbhum-based Sri Gopal Rice Mill's chief Sushil Kumar Choudhury said the rice production in the state may drop by 35 per cent this Kharif.  

The monsoon situation has already raised apprehensions of a drought, with the weather office having concluded that rainfall in india as a whole remained deficient by 28 per cent as on August 9, compared with 19 per cent 10 days before that.     

The deficiency is higher at 42 per cent in north western regions of the country, including parts of Uttar Pradesh.     

Asserting that the Centre's announcement to provide subsidy up to Rs 7.50 per litre of diesel for irrigation won't help much, Kanodia said the doleout is just a sort of "patch-work".     

Moreover, he observed that irrigation is no substitude to rainfall as far as its impact on the growth of the crop is concerned. Even if the sowing is over, the growth of the crops may still be stunted if it doesn't rain in time, he added.     

About 66 per cent of the country's 140 million hectares of farm land depends on rain for cultivation.