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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Sonia stands by food bill draft by Radhika Ramaseshan

Sonia stands by food bill draft by Radhika Ramaseshan

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published Published on Feb 27, 2011   modified Modified on Feb 27, 2011

The Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council (NAC) has managed to have its way on key demands on the food security bill.

Bolstered by the Congress president’s “resolve”, the panel will go ahead and draft its own version of the bill and hope that Sonia’s veto will persuade the Centre to discard its stated objections and adopt the NAC’s draft as law. “Yeh tho hona hi hai,” Sonia reportedly said.

A panel member said the process for getting the food security bill the way it wanted took a step forward when on Sonia’s counsel it prepared and submitted an explanatory note to the food ministry on February 21.

“The purpose was to assure the Centre that we were not in conflict with it and that we did not intend to trash the Rangarajan committee’s proposals. In fact our note did not even mention the committee by name. The aim was to elucidate our points of view. To impart a sense of transparency to our endeavour we put it up on our website for people to see,” explained a member.

The committee headed by C. Rangarajan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s economic adviser, had rejected the NAC’s draft and was thought to reflect the official “mind” (read Singh and former food minister Sharad Pawar).

However, K.V. Thomas, who took over the food ministry after the last cabinet shuffle, met the NAC members frequently and indicated that the ministry would go along with their ideas.

The explanatory note stressed that the bill should take an all-encompassing view of the issue and not confine itself to public distribution system (PDS) entitlements. “The PDS, while important and essential, is only one of several interventions needed to ensure food security for all,” the note said.

Secondly, the PDS entitlements, it noted, must cover the entire lifecycle of a person — starting with overcoming maternal and foetal under-nourishment to the needs of old and infirm people.

It also tried to address a major concern of the government — voiced in the Rangarajan report — about demand-supply mismatch if PDS coverage was to be near universal as the NAC sought.

The note pegged the total food requirements — PDS and non-PDS — to be around 64 million metric tonnes when the food security act was fully rolled out.

“Procuring 60-65 million metric tonnes of foodgrains annually should not be difficult.

“By its own admission, the ministry of agriculture concurs that arranging for 60-70 million metric tonnes for the vulnerable sections may not pose serious constraints,” the note maintained, adding that there has been “steady increase” in foodgrains’ procurement by the Centre and a larger potential for higher food production.

The NAC is expected to unveil its final draft in the next meeting on March 24.

The Telegraph, 27 February, 2011, http://telegraphindia.com/1110227/jsp/nation/story_13642713.jsp


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