A scam worth about Rs 8.81 crore has been detected in the Food Corporation of India (FCI) godown at Dumroan in Buxar district. While assistant manager of the godown Umakant Dubey has been suspended by senior area manager of FCI Sandipan Chattopadhyay, an FIR has been lodged with the Dumroan police station in this connection. According to Chattopadhyay, the FCI has been running two popular schemes -- Karif Marketing Season (KMS)...

The Food Corporation of India (FCI) should feel relieved that the private sector has stepped in to create additional foodgrain storage capacity, bridging the extant gap. However, it is difficult to fathom why much of the new warehousing capacity is sought to be put in place in grain-surplus states (production centres) — notably Punjab and Haryana, besides some others like Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra — rather than in...

The food distribution agencies of states across India have failed to lift the desired quantities of foodgrains under the additional allocation made recently for the Public Distribution System, says the Food Corporation of India (FCI), the central government’s procurement and storage agency. FCI sought instructions from the Centre in September to offload an additional 2.5 million tonnes for the PDS as a consequence of the reports about poor storage and rotting...

The NAC proposals for the food security bill are narrow and lack in vision. What is needed is a comprehensive bill with universalisation of PDS and a focus on child malnutrition.   There was much excitement when food security became one of the issues in the manifestos of most major political parties in the run up to the 2009 General Elections. With burgeoning food stocks, double-digit food inflation, stagnant malnutrition rates, declining...

Fifty-five thousand metric tonnes of food grains rotted in Punjab alone and thousands of tonnes more across the nation. The pictures of rotting grains might have shocked us, but not Adesh Pratap Singh, the Food Minister of Punjab and certainly not Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The documents accessed by CNN-IBN through an RTI revealed that this rot was expected. A copy of a letter by Punjab's...