New Delhi With no political consensus as yet to allow the foreign direct investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, India needs to undertake structural reforms urgently to curb food inflation that surged to a 15-month high of 10.49% in April on dearer vegetables and protein-based products.

Economists said these reforms should focus on four fundamental aspects: raising productivity, curbing wastages, better distribution and delivery system, and ensuring fair returns to producers to keep them engaged in the farm sector.

New Delhi: Food Corporation of India (FCI) has warned that unless the government can distribute 750 lakh tonnes of food grain, there will be no storage space for the bumper harvest being currently procured, the food ministry told Rajya Sabha on Monday. The crisis of plenty has been engaging the government for a while as it is under pressure to distribute food grain to the poor or intervene in some manner to cool inflation, and the FCI alarm provides the clearest indication of the scale of the problem.

Food Minister K V Thomas on Monday said the problem of foodgrain storage was due to procurement exceeding targets because of record production and encouraging purchase policy, and assured the state governments all help in providing jute bags to overcome the “problem of plenty”. In the Rajya Sabha, he proposed an all-party meeting to work out a procurement policy to avoid such a crisis in future.

Stating that the proposed Food Security Bill is “inadequate,” Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat said on Sunday that the Left parties will stage an agitation pressing for the inclusion of everyone, irrespective of whether they are classified as below or above the poverty line.

“Every family should be entitled to 35 kg of foodgrains at the rate of Rs. 2 per kg. Only the rich should be exempted from this privilege,” he said, adding that at least 80 per cent of the people must be covered under the public distribution system.

It is a good news that Punjab no longer cheers for. The state is headed for a record wheat harvest of over 120 lakh tonnes this Rabi season surpassing all previous milestones. It is almost 10 lakh tonnes higher than the previous record of 110 lakh tonnes. The high production has come from better yield per acre, an average of 7 per cent more, owing to cool weather conditions and timely winter rain that also brought down the incidence of pest attack and disease.

New Delhi With the grain stocks held with Food Corporation of India (FCI) and other state government owned agencies crossing a record level, the food ministry has proposed additional allocation of grain to BPL and APL families for dealing with storage crunch.

Under the proposal sent to finance ministry, the food ministry has proposed to hike grain allocation for the estimated 18 crore APL families to 15 kg per month from prevailing 10 kg per month. This will result in excess grains allocation of 6.5 million tonne.

New Delhi Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday reiterated his opposition to the food ministry’s proposal for providing grain as part-payment of wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).

“The work carried out under the food-for-work programme was really of bad quality and we do not want to repeat the same mistake,” Ramesh said after getting Parliament nod for the changes in NREGA, which allows atleast 30 new works to be taken up under the mega job-guarantee scheme.

New Delhi As part of its plan to create two-million-tonne-capacity silos for storing grain across the country, the government has approved creation of silos in 10 states with the capacities ranging from 4 lakh tonne to 50,000 tonne.

The state-level committees on silos are identifying suitable locations, which would be built via the private-public-partnership mode. Food minister KV Thomas said that while 4-lakh-tonne-capacity silos would be built in Punjab, Madhya Pradesh would get silos with a capacity 3.5 lakh tonne. Haryana and UP would get silos with 3-lakh-tonne capacity each.