BHUBANESWAR – The Odisha state government has uncovered a massive attempt at procurement fraud, identifying approximately 19 lakh plots that were falsely registered for paddy sales under the Minimum Support Price (MSP) scheme. The discovery was made during an extensive verification exercise for the 2025–26 Kharif Marketing Season (KMS), using advanced satellite imagery to distinguish genuine cultivation from fraudulent claims.
The investigation was triggered by the state’s proactive use of the Paddy Land Monitoring System, which initially flagged 26.14 lakh land parcels across all 30 districts as “suspected non-cultivated plots.” Following this digital red flag, ground-level officials conducted physical field surveys of 24.94 lakh plots to verify the claims. The results were startling: only 5.46 lakh plots were confirmed to have actual paddy crops, while nearly 19 lakh plots—roughly 76% of those verified—were found to be non-agricultural land or areas with no cultivation.
According to official sources, many of the forged registrations involved non-farm land such as ponds, orchards, forest areas, and even public infrastructure like schools or government buildings. These “ghost plots” were likely registered to exploit the high MSP in Odisha, which currently stands at ₹3,100 per quintal (including a state-provided ₹800 bonus). This cleanup ensures that the state’s massive procurement budget reaches the hands of genuine, hard-working farmers rather than middlemen or unscrupulous registrants.
In response to these findings, the District Registrar of Cooperative Societies (DRCS) has been ordered to issue immediate show-cause notices to all individuals who provided erroneous land data. Furthermore, the government has withheld the issuance of online procurement tokens for all identified non-paddy land. Without these tokens, these individuals cannot participate in the government-run mandis, effectively blocking the sale of non-existent paddy and preventing a significant loss to the state exchequer.
The state government has emphasized that this technology-driven, three-step verification process—satellite identification, field inspection, and administrative approval—is now a permanent fixture of its procurement policy. By integrating geospatial data with on-ground accountability, Odisha aims to eliminate “ghost procurement” and ensure 100% transparency in the agricultural supply chain, which is scheduled to continue through March 2026