State to convince farmers to cultivate onion in Kharif season

Kolkata: The Food Processing Industries & Horticulture (FPI&H) department is taking a slew of measures to encourage farmers in the state to take up the cultivation of onion, particularly during the Kharif season, to reduce the gap between demand and production.

“We will soon sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with National Horticultural Research and Development Foundation (NHRDF) for developing a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in onion. We have requested NHRDF to provide seeds of Kharif onion, produced in their laboratory, to us ahead of the Kharif season. The seeds are of high quality and free of adulteration. The cost, however, is a bit high and we are negotiating. We are hopeful that procurement of seeds will augment onion production during Kharif season,” said a senior official of FPI&H department.

NHRDF is a Delhi-based organisation recognised by the Ministry of Agriculture and is responsible for the development of 90 per cent of the onion and garlic varieties grown in our country.

The FPI& H department’s minister Arup Roy and additional chief secretary Subrata Gupta recently held a meeting with NHRDF representatives where the decision to host several collaborative programmes in districts was taken.

“We have identified five of our horticulture farms where we will undertake a demonstration of onion cultivation from January to encourage farmers. We will identify several progressive farmers from five districts who will be accompanying horticulture officers from those districts on study tours to Rajasthan and Haryana where they will witness how the benefits of NHRDF’s collaboration have transformed farmers’ income,” Gupta said.

According to a senior department official, the Bengal farmers prefer cultivation as per their choices and are reluctant to diversify. Hence, motivating them to take up onion cultivation is a challenge.

The state for the last few years has been undertaking cultivation of ‘Agrifound Dark Red’ variety onion during the Kharif season and has seen success in Murshidabad and Bankura district. However, the scale of cultivation required to significantly bring down the demand and production gap has not happened.

The cultivation of onion is negligible during the Kharif season. Thus, the state has to then depend mainly on imports from Nashik, parts of Andhra Pradesh, parts of Karnataka and Bihar. This leads to soaring prices. This year, onion prices were on the higher side for almost two months. It has been barely a week that prices are going down. The state imports around 5 lakh metric tonnes of onion annually to meet the annual demand of 13 lakh metric tonnes.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has been calling for cutting down on imports of onion and moving towards self-sufficiency in its cultivation. Presently, the state is much dependent on the ‘Sukhsagar’ onion ( a whitish variety) that is cultivated during winter and gives its yield

during summer.