Govt confident of wheat estimates

The government today stood by its wheat output projection of 73.7 million tonnes for the 2006-07 season even while indicating that prices are unlikely to fall.

The Centre's expression of confidence on its estimate comes at a time when speculation is rife that the actual production may fall short of the estimate.

International prices and government's procurement prices have gone up impacting wheat prices, said Agriculture Secretary P K Mishra. He was speaking at a workshop on agricultural statistics held here.

"The indication we get is that the wheat output is good. Whatever we had thought earlier, it would never be less than that," Mishra added.

The final estimate on the production, based on crop cutting, will be released within a week, he added.

As per the third advance estimate, the output would be 73.7 million tonnes in 2006-07 season.

Speaking at the function, the agriculture secretary asked the four major wheat growing states "" Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh "" to increase the ouput by five million tonnes.

He wanted to know from officials of Bihar, which estimated an increase of one million tonnes of wheat over the previous year, about the accuracy of their prediction and how did they arrive at it.

"If production is more, where is the wheat?," he asked, adding the availability in the market should reflect on the prices.

However, he later clarified that the ministry did not doubt about the estimate of wheat in these four states.

"We have no doubts. As the nature of agricultural statistics is so widespread, we wanted them to crosscheck as we do at our level," he said. Speaking about the crop conditions in the on-going Kharif sowing season, the agriculture secretary said there was no cause of concern as of now.

"This is just the beginning of the monsoon and overall impact will be good," Mishra said, adding it was too early as many states received rainfalls only 2-3 days ago.

He said the agricultural production estimate should be as close to the reality as possible because any decision on import is dependent on the likely output.

Stressing on the need to have accuracy in prediction, he conceded that in agriculture it was impossible to estimate exactly. However, he said, "there should be a system to estimate as accurate as possible."