Union Minister of Agriculture, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Sharad Pawar on Friday said retail prices of some food items like pulses, edible oil, milk and vegetables have been rising in the last six months. “There are few items (essential commodities) where there is no improvement in prices…retail prices of pulses such as urad dal and moong dal, edible oils like groundnut oil and vanaspati, milk and potato have shown...

A team of central officials and experts will visit Jharkhand to assess the drought situation, Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar said in the Lok Sabha today, a day after Raj Bhavan added four names to the existing list of 12 parched districts. Tomorrow, the central team will go to Bihar, which has also recorded deficit rainfall this monsoon, on a similar mission. Pawar’s assurance came in response to a question raised by...

Acknowledging that the rotting foodgrain was “shameful” , the government told Parliament on Tuesday that aggressive measures will be taken to increase storage capacity in the next 2-3 years. The government was also considering giving infrastructure status to warehouses to attract the private sector into the field in a bid to increase storage space. Responding to a calling attention motion in the Rajya Sabha, agriculture minister Sharad Pawar said: “We...

The government is likely to provide subsidised wheat and rice to 1.5 crore additional BPL families from October 2, Food and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar told the Rajya Sabha on Friday. Replying to supplementaries during Question Hour, he said the Planning Commission will give the revised number of people living below poverty line (BPL) in a month's time. The revision is being done based on the parameter decided by the...

EVERY OTHER day there is either a newspaper report or an editorial comment lamenting the loss of food grain stored in buffer stocks. Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, while prophesying a bumper kharif crop, admits he is worried about not having adequate storage for the produce. At a national conference in 2003, the Central Warehousing Corporation said it had covered storage capacity for 48 million tonnes of food grain. In 2002,...