Wednesday, January 08, 2003
Food relief for 10m more
Surinder Sud in New Delhi
Published : January 8, 2003
The food ministry proposes to extend the facility of getting wheat and rice at subsidised rates of Rs 2 and Rs 3 per kg, respectively, to an additional 10 million poverty-stricken families.
This will push up the total coverage of the below poverty line households under the Antodaya scheme to 20 million from the present 10 million. Disclosing this in an exclusive interview with Business Standard, Food Minister Sharad Yadav said a detailed note on this subject was being prepared for the Cabinet's approval.
A meeting of the state chief ministers will be convened to discuss the matter with them and seek their co-operation in sorting out problems in the implementation of the scheme.
Yadav said about one crore poor families, representing 15.33 per cent of the total below poverty line population, were benefiting from this scheme at present.
The expanded scheme would extend this benefit to 30.66 per cent of the below poverty line population.
The additional requirement of foodgrains for this purpose is estimated at 4.5 million tonnes. Each family will be entitled to buy 35 kg of foodgrains in a month at subsidised prices.
Though the precise impact of this move on the overall food subsidy has not yet been worked out, it will not be too large, Yadav feels. The supply of wheat and rice to the poor was already heavily subsidised.
At the current economic cost of foodgrains to the Food Corporation of India, this subsidy worked out at Rs 6.31 a kg for rice and Rs 4.46 a kg for wheat for the below poverty line cardholders. For the Antyodaya families, it would, roughly, be around Rs 9 a kg for rice and Rs 6.80 for wheat. The Centre is currently spending about Rs 40,000 crore in operating welfare-oriented foodgrain supply schemes.
These include, besides Antyodaya, mid-day-meal for school children, foodgrains for indigent people, food-for-work programmes, allocation for calamity relief schemes, and employment-oriented food-for-work programmes under the main rural development programme called Sampoorna Gramin Rojgar Yojna.
Yadav said a taskforce of food ministry officials that visited the states where starvation deaths were reported, had found several malpractices in the functioning of the public distribution system.
At some places, people owning tractors were found to possess Antyodaya cards for buying cheap foodgrains, while many of the deserving poor families did not have the ration cards.
"My priority is to simplify and fine-tune the procedure for identifying the below poverty line households for coverage under the Antyodaya and other welfare schemes. The landless labourers, most of whom have no homes, also need to be extended the benefit of these schemes," Yadav said.
He said the consumer affairs department of his ministry would launch an awareness campaign for curbing the malpractices in the public distribution system being operated by the state governments.
The non-governmental organisations, apart from the Panchayati Raj bodies, would be involved in overseeing the functioning of the distribution system to ensure that the benefits reached the targeted population, he added. Yadav said the reports of starvation deaths had now stopped, thanks to the Centre's intervention in ensuring adequate foodgrain availability even at the village level.
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