The government will provide seeds during the Boro season to six lakh farmers who lost crops in the recent floods across the country, according to sources in the agriculture ministry.

Crops like aus paddy, covering around 15,000 hectares in 30 districts, have been damaged by the floods, sources said. According to the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE), a huge number of seedbeds of aman and a large number of vegetable fields have also been wiped out in the floods.

The DAE’s decision is aimed at encouraging the farmers through aman plantation and recovering the damages caused by the floods.

The DAE has set a target of bringing 53,00,5000 hectares under aman cultivation this year, with a target of producing 1.37 crore tonnes of rice against nearly 1.32 crore tonnes of rice produced last season.

The government has taken up a series of programmes to help the farmers tide over their problems caused by the floods, the DAE sources said.

“We are nursing buffer seedbeds of Transplanted Aman (T Aman) of late varieties on 100 acres. These seedlings will be distributed among 6,000 affected farmers free of cost,” Alhaj Uddin Ahmed, the additional director of the DAE’s field

services wing, told The Independent yesterday. These T-Aman seedlings are being prepared on the lands of Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation (BADC) and DAE, he added.

“The government will provide Boro seeds to six lakh farmers free of cost during the Boro season to recover their losses caused by the floods,” he said in reply to a query.

When asked about the number of affected farmers and the quantity of crops, he said: “We’re yet to finalise the report on the damages caused by the floods. We hope it will be completed by the next week. We think aus paddy covering 10,000–12,000 hectares have been damaged.”

He also said the late-planting varieties of T-Aman would ensure that the flood-hit farmers could recover the time loss and get a good harvest in due time.

Apart from the DAE and BADC, the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) and the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) are also preparing seedbeds to provide the affected farmers with seedlings of late sowing varieties of T Aman, sources said. The farmers have cultivated aus paddy on 10,91,000 hectares across the country, he said, adding that about 23 lakh tonnes of aus paddy are normally produced annually in the country.

The production of aus paddy per hectare is 2.5 tonnes, he said. According to the DAE sources, the flood has caused extensive damage to aus paddy in 30 districts, including Bogra, Faridpur, Nilphamari, Sirajganj, Kurigram, Gaibandha, Tangail and Jamalpur.