-Economic and Political Weekly   A "high-level" committee makes half-baked recommendations which will rollback the PDS. A ccording to media reports, former Union Minister for Food Shanta Kumar recently disowned the National Food Security Act (NFSA) on behalf of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He explained, without blinking, that the BJP had just pretended to support the Act when it was being discussed in Parliament, for fear of the possible electoral consequences of...

-Scroll.in The strongest safeguard against fraud is not end-to-end computerisation but clarity of entitlements: if people know what is due to them, they will fight for it. In a stunning admission of party hypocrisy, former Food Minister Shanta Kumar recently stated that the Bharatiya Janata Party's support for the National Food Security Act last year was just a pretence. Remember, when the act was being discussed in Parliament, BJP leaders (from Narendra...

-The Hindu Business Line New Delhi: Flaying the Shanta Kumar panel's recommendations to reduce coverage of subsidised foodgrains from 67 per cent of the population to 40 per cent, food rights activists have urged the Modi government to reject the report, as it would mean going back on the BJP's election promises. The panel, headed by BJP MP Shanta Kumar, was constituted to recommend the restructuring the Food Corporation of India....

-The Financial Express   Senior BJP leader and former food minister Shanta Kumar, who headed a high-level committee on restructuring Food Corporation of India, on Thursday termed the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013 as ‘vote security' legislation that would lead to massive diversion of grains from the public distribution system (PDS). "Prior to the passage of the food security act, we had expressed reservation on providing highly subsidised foodgrains to 67% of...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Friday that his government won't cut subsidies for the poor, it has now come to light that the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra has already silently discontinued the food subsidy for nearly 2 crore people in the state. According to sources, the Devendra Fadnavis government has decided to discontinue supply of subsidised food grains to 1.77 crore people who were...