The government admitted to the empowered group of ministers (EGoM) on food and prices that 61,000 tonnes of foodgrain had rotted in its granaries as it was kept with poor protection for too long. The EGoM headed by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee was ascertaining the status of overflowing stocks in Food Corporation of India godowns. Sources said Haryana and Punjab were unable to protect or sell the 15.5 million tonnes...

Some 48,315 tonnes of wheat procured by the Punjab government is to be fed to cattle after being declared unfit for human consumption. The stock, enough to feed around 595,000 people through the public distribution system (PDS) for a year, had piled up over the previous three years. Officials at the Food Corporation of India (FCI), which declared the grains unfit after an inquiry in March, said Punjab’s procurement agencies had...

The National Advisory Council's proposals on the Food Security Bill represent a bad deal for the poor. The struggle for an effective and equitable Food Security Bill (FSB) has received a setback with the disappointing proposals put forward by the National Advisory Council. There is a disturbing disjuncture between what is being claimed and the actual implications of the proposals. Indeed it may be said that the NAC proposals create new...

A day after the Prime Minister urged a quick start to a national food security network, it has emerged that his government may let foodgrain —enough to feed 140 million poor people for a month—decay, instead of spending money and effort distributing it to the poor. Warning of an “emergency situation”, a person familiar with the situation told the Hindustan Times that 17.8 million tonnes of wheat and rice are being...

Crops are grown outside our towns. Anger over food prices grows in our towns. Put these two facts together, and you can figure out exactly how divorced, sometimes, the justifiable concern about food inflation is from the cold realities of agriculture. It is not as if we can really blame ourselves for blindness, either; the unreformed, statist nature of price discovery in agriculture insulates us, as in no other sector,...