By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, March 12, 2016 : Odisha is once again facing a crisis in the supply of  potato with the Potato Mission in the state making no headway. The state government, like the previous year, will have to totally depend on the mercy of Mamata Banerjee government of West Bengal to meet its potato requirement, sources said.

Although the state agriculture department does not make public the imminent potato crisis the state is going to face in the coming days, – the survey conducted by its own procurement and marketing agency Marked has bared it all by deciding not to procure potato from farmers.

Odisha battled a serious potato crisis 2014. The price of this most favoured vegetable rose to Rs 50. The state government, which then came under serious criticism for the situation, announced to form Potato Mission targeting to make Odisha self-reliant on potato production by 2018.

The agriculture department generously provided crores of rupees as subsidy for cultivation and preservation of potato. However, nobody has ever assessed what went wrong and the state government was again pushed to this similar crisis this year.

Sources said contrary to the state government’s expectation of increase in potato production, – it has come down significantly. The agriculture department, which has complete picture about this, – has deliberately suppressed the fact as it would embarrass the government and give a handle to the Opposition to attack the administration on the issue.

Marked had targeted to procure 3200 tonnes of potato this year. In order to assess the potato production, it had conducted survey in Koraput, Bolangir, Jharsuguda, Cuttack and eight other districts. The results, the sources added, were quite discouraging.

The Marked came to know that it would be able to procure more than 300 tonnes of potato following the fall in production.

As against its target to procure 4600 tonnes of potato in 2015, Marked had procured only 466 tonnes of the produce. What is quite worse is that the agency incurred huge losses as it paid huge rent towards storing of potato at cold stores in Patia in Bhubaneswar and Jagatpur in Cuttack.