Telangana: Rice millers go for Bihar rice to escape local taxes

Hyderabad: Rice millers of Telangana are going for Bihar rice and avoiding Nagarjunasagar ayacut rice to escape taxes. Millers are illegally transporting rice from Bihar. The racket is going on unabated even after tax officials seized 124 trucks of Bihar rice in Nalgonda last week that was illegally brought to the state. Local farmers are suffering huge losses due to this racket. Miryalaguda is Asia's largest rice milling centre and hundreds of rice mills operate there. Millers used to procure paddy only from Nagarjunasagar ayacut farmers till recently. But they stopped buying paddy from Nagarjuna-sagar farmers this season citing 'poor quality' and started importing huge quantities from Bihar via the Railways.

Millers say that Nagarjunasagar paddy has a moisture content of 20 per cent, while Bihar paddy has just 15 per cent and there is no sales tax on Bihar paddy. They say that they could procure Bihar rice for just Rs 1,700 to Rs 2,000 a quintal including import tax. However, the recent raids by vigilance and enforcement department in Nalgonda district revealed that millers have been evading all state government taxes by bringing rice from Bihar.

During the raids on January 24 and February 4, tax officials seized 4,800 tonnes of paddy worth Rs 10 crore illegally brought from Bihar by evading all taxes due to the state government. There were no waybills or invoices with them for the rice. The millers unload the stocks from railway wagons and load them on to trucks. The tax officials collected 5 per cent tax from each truck, and this fetched Rs 24.30 lakh for the government.

Shockingly, all the stocks were bought in the name of a single rice mill, but were supplied to various mills across Nalgonda district. The milled rice is being sold to dealers directly causing huge losses to the TS exchequer.