Soon after the Yogi Adityanath-government came to the power, it made mandatory for mills to open an escrow account which proved to be a boon for farmers in protecting, securing, increasing their income and bringing in transparency to the system.
As per rules, 85 percent money received in the account was kept for farmer payment. This resulted in arresting diversion of money for purposes other than cane payment, officials here on Saturday said.
This new system brought transparency in getting the amount of sugarcane price from sugar mills to the farmers. Now the account of sugarcane price is being operated jointly by the mill representative and district cane officer/senior cane development inspector.
Earlier, mills used to divert funds for other purposes. But after setting up an escrow account, the money deposited was used directly for payment of cane price to the farmers.
For instance, a purchaser of sugar from mills is required to deposit 85 per cent of the price of the commodity in the escrow account and the rest 15 per cent to the seller i.e. sugar mills. Gradually, molasses, bagasse, ethanol and even sanitiser were added in the Yogi government.
Besides, ethanol produced from B-heavy molasses or sugarcane juice and that used for sanitizer production were also tagged for payment of cane price. In fact, cane price payment got accelerated due to an increase in ethanol production and sale.
Such sugar mills, which are making ethanol directly from sugarcane juice, have tagged 55 percent of the value of ethanol produced in those mills for payment of cane price.
About 65 percent of the selling price of ethanol used by the mills for the production of sanitizers has also been tagged for payment of sugarcane price, due to which the problem of payment of sugarcane price to the farmers has ended.
The state government has taken many big steps to strengthen the sugarcane farmers in the state. To address the various problems of sugarcane farmers, the government has issued a toll free number 1800-121-3203.
Now the sugarcane farmers are getting their solution by registering their complaint on toll-free number 1800-103-5823 for the problem of survey, speculation, calendar, slip etc. With this initiative of the government, so far 117926 complaints out of 122125 complaints have been resolved.
