A panel of experts that sets the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance administration’s social agenda is likely to reject a draft law to offer cash compensation to the poor, who do not receive their quota of subsidized foodgrain. Members of the National Advisory Council (NAC), which is led by Congress president Sonia Gandhi, insisted during a Thursday meeting that the entitlement should be universal, instead of being restricted to families below the...

Furious debates among policymakers about the proposed national food security law largely revolve around its financial repercussions. The Planning Commission is finally coming around to accepting the Tendulkar Committee’s estimates of 37.2 per cent BPL population or 8.5 crore BPL households. The fiscal burden in implementing the food security law for 37.5 per cent BPL population, with each household being provided 35 kg food grains, is estimated to be Rs...

At a time the country is facing high food inflation, its bread basket is sitting on colossal wheat stocks. The stocks, to the tune of 12 million tonnes, lying in godowns and open spaces in Punjab are giving sleepless nights to the Food Corporation of India (FCI). About 800,000 tonnes wheat moves out of Punjab in a month. Based on these figures, the state can clear about five million tonnes wheat...

It is the availability of adequate foodgrains to meet the mandatory requirements under the proposed National Food Security Bill that worries the government, not the enhanced subsidy such a move would entail. From what the government is planning it appears that the subsidies on petroleum products would go to meet the requirement of providing cheap foodgrains to the poor under the Public Distribution System (PDS) and to bring the Above...

One of the first issues the reconstituted National Advisory Council (NAC) will have to deal with is the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA). Given the inability of the government to control food prices that remain unacceptably high and the scant regard the ruling United Progressive Alliance has shown for food security, it should be taken up on an urgent basis if the government is to preserve its credibility among...