Dr MS Swaminathan, NAC member and the father of India's green revolution talks to Rupashree Nanda on the food security legislation, the neglect in creating storage infrastructure and ideas like outsourcing food security issues. Rupashree Nanda: The main reason for the NAC climb down from the promised universal PDS to targeted PDS was the stated non - availability of foodgrains. Would you agree to that argument? Isn't there is not enough...

India does not have enough surplus stocks of foodgrains for exports in the short-term and the country needs to boost its farm production significantly, to meet the expected rise in domestic demand by 2020, a top official of FCI said on Wednesday. "The country has adequate stock of foodgrains to meet our needs...there is not much surplus availability of the food grains for export in the short-term," Food Corporation of...

The Food Corporation of India (FCI) wants to outsource India's food security. CNN-IBN through a Right to Information (RTI) exposes a food scam in the making. Father of the green revolution Professor MS Swaminathan calls it a national disaster.   The government did a poor job of both storing and distributing foodgrains and let thousands of tonnes simply lie and rot.   "Outsource India's food security" that is what the Chairman and Managing Director...

A parliamentary committee has asked the government to consider incentivising private players to set up grain storage facilities as it prepares to implement the right to food. The government will require around 620 lakh tonnes of foodgrain annually to implement the food security law. The official procurement stood at 539.75 lakh tonnes in the recent marketing year. “(The) government should provide soft loans at affordable rates and subsidies to private players to...

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...