The raid was conducted based on complaints filed by clients who charged the firm of selling pilfered sacks of urea.[break]
The company sells 50-kg sacks of urea at a price of Rs 900 each. But when the police weighed the sealed sacks on Tuesday, the sacks contained 2 kg to 10.5 kg less urea than mentioned in the label.
Following the raid, the state-owned company has stopped selling the fertilizer indefinitely and initiated investigation into the matter. But farmers are not satisfied.
“The incident indicates that we might have been cheated for a long time. This is not fair,” visibly angry Ramdev Yadav, a farmer of Buddhanagar-3, told Republica.
According to Agriculture Inputs Company, it imports urea manufactured by Brahmaputra Bheri Fertilizer Company located in Assam of India as per the agreement that the government has signed with Minerals and Metals Trading Corporation of Assam.
Currently, the state-owned company has an inventory of 4,373 sacks of urea. And an additional 29,788 sacks of fertilizer that have arrived from India are yet to be unloaded. Of this, 4,000 sacks have been ferried to Itahari branch of the company, 2,050 to Birtamod, 1,980 to Dhankuta, 1,680 to Rajbiraj and 300 sacks to Khotang.
“We don´t know how the sealed sacks fell short of weight mentioned in the label,” said Hari Prasad Gajurel, chief of fertilizer distribution center at the eastern regional office of the company. He, however, acknowledged that the centre never checks weight of each sack it receives.
Superintendant of Police Pradhyumna Karki said: “It would not have created a fuss had the sacks contained half or a kilogram less than the mentioned weight. But shortfall of 2-10.5 kg is too much to ignore.”
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