Chief minister Raghubar Das and agriculture minister Randhir Singh on Wednesday convened a series of meetings with the agriculture department officials and disaster management department and appointed a task force at district level to submit block-wise report by October 15. The government has admitted around 20% loss of paddy and 10% loss to maize throughout the state whereas different districts have suffered varied degree of losses. Among the worst-affected districts are Garhwa and Palamu with 40% expected loss, west Singhbhum with 38% loss, Lohardaga accounting for 35%, Ranchi, Simdega Hazaribag and Ramgarh around 30% and in rest of the districts the loss ranges from 15-20%. Addressing the media, agriculture minister Randhir Kumar Singh said that the loss is likely to increase after the discussion on district level reports on the situation till September 30 in the meeting. "We have asked all the deputy commissioners of respective districts to form a task force and prepare a block level report which will also be forwarded to the Centre for its appraisal," he said adding that a preliminary report on the situation has already been forwarded to the centre. This year as against the targeted 17.67 lakh hectare, paddy was cultivated on 16.57 hectare, maize on 2.76 lakh hectare (3.10 lakh hectare), pulses on 3.41 lakh hectare (4.81 lakh hectare) and oilseeds on 36,000 hectare as against targeted 56,000 hectares due to delayed onset of monsoon and scanty rain. The minister said that the state had targeted covering around 5 lakh farmers under the crop insurance scheme and after the Centre agreed to extend the deadline for crop insurance from August 15 to September 15, as many as 4.41 lakh non-loanee farmers and 97,000 of those linked with agriculture credit plans were linked with the scheme. "On one hand we are trying to disburse the pending premium of insurance scheme and on the other hand proposal has been sent to the Centre for releasing fund for the financial year 2013-14 to give away the insurance compensation to the farmers," Singh said clarifying that state and Centre both will contribute Rs 23 crore each towards insurance claims for lost crop of that period. Director of agriculture, Jata Shankar Choudhary, said that in meteorological sense the state is not yet suffering with drought but the Centre has been apprised of the ground situation. "There are several parameters on which the Centre categorizes districts as drought-hit and at present no district of Jharkhand is in the 'look out' or 'alert' category," he said. Choudhary further appealed to the farmers to arrange for protective irrigation with their own resources and expressed hope that a wet spell cannot be ruled out in the next few days. Meanwhile, the directorate has advised banks to focus on disbursing loans to farmers through kisan credit cards. Source - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com