The food ministry seems all set to spike some of the more ambitious proposals made by the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC), because it sees some of them as being too liberal and not taking into account existing systems of procurement and distribution.
One of the major issues which seems to have held up the Food Security Bill is the issue of differential pricing of grain for the Above Poverty Line card holders. The Planning Commission had suggested linking APL grain price to minimum support price (MSP), a view endorsed by the food ministry. However, the NAC went further, saying the issue price for APL families should be Rs 5 and Rs 7.50 for rice and wheat, respectively. The ministry, on its part, says this would be lower than even the existing issue price for BPL cardholders. ?Such lower issue prices for APL cardholders would mean increased demand by APL families from PDS and is bound to result in huge demand for PDS grain from the APL segment, which may not be manageable with the present level of procurement and distribution machinery,? the ministry said in its response to the proposal.
Concerns have often been raised over the levels of grain procurement required to supply all the entitled groups listed in the NAC’s proposals. ?NAC proposals involve grain requirement in the range of 60-70 million tonne with a PDS requirement of 50-50 million tonne. However, the above estimate does not include the APL entitlement in urban areas, and the fact that the average procurement in the last 10 years has been 43.7 million tonne. Hence, the grain requirement should be kept within manageable levels of procurement keeping in mind past trends,? the food ministry has said.
?The NAC proposals do not make any provision for strategic reserve requirement (5 million metric tonne), including base level stocks (2 million metric tonne), and market intervention measures (5 million metric tonne), which require a total of around 12 million metric tonne. Further, strategic reserve requirements of 5 million metric tonne need to be increased substantially if food security is to be guaranteed under law to meet any contingencies of lower production in any given year,? the food ministry note has observed.
The NAC is scheduled to meet again on October 24, and in the meantime, the tug of war between the council and the policymakers is expected to get sharper.