The Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Friday charged the Congress-led government with failure to check food prices and inflation.
“The Central government follows policies which help hoarders and speculators and then blames State governments for not taking action. Indeed it is the contradictory statements of different Central Ministers which are fuelling inflationary expectations,” the party Polit Bureau said in a statement.
Inflation remained high at 17.28 per cent in the week ending January 2. Prices of sugar, cereals, pulses and vegetables continued to rise.
The party said the recent note by the Cabinet Committee on Prices showed that the Centre wanted to shirk its responsibility by blaming the States. Without proper assessment of the causes behind the relentless increase in food prices, effective measures could not be undertaken. One of the reasons for high sugar prices was the failure of the Centre to build a sugar buffer stock. Instead it incentivised exports helping big traders and sugar mill owners.
Sugar imports with a slew of concessions to importers since early last year had not resulted in lowering the retail price of sugar with only the traders and big companies profiting. “The Cabinet does not address these issues but instead blames the States. In fact, all the three Left-led State governments have removed VAT on sugar as have many others,” it said.
It said the Centre’s move to release buffer stocks of food grains in the open market instead of providing it to State governments at subsidised rates was a “faulty approach.” Even the so-called additional food grains allocations offered to State governments is double the price of the earlier Above Poverty Line allocations.
The threat to State governments that Central agencies like the NAFED and the NCCF will directly provide subsidised food grains, oil and pulses to consumers in States, it said, went against the federal character of the Constitution.
As for “the homily” to the State governments to undertake steps to check hoarding sounds hollow when it was the Centre that liberalised inter-State movement of food grains and relaxed stockholding norms for private traders and corporates.
The party demanded that the government take steps, including release of cereal stocks through the public distribution system by increasing rice and wheat quotas to the States, and bring Food Security legislation; supply sugar, pulses and edible oils through PDS at cheap rates, immediately ban all future trading in food articles; launch countrywide crackdown against hoarders; and reduce diesel and petrol rates prices by slashing indirect taxes.
