Pressure from the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) on the new Union Food Minister, K.V. Thomas, to accept its recommendations rather than the watered down version of the Rangarajan panel, which was set up to examine the NAC's recommendations, appears to be working.
Government sources told The Hindu that the Union Food Ministry is hoping to shortly convene a consultation of its officials with representatives of the NAC and the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council to try and harmonise the recommendations of the two on the proposed Food Security Bill.
For Mr. Thomas, the first challenge, these sources said, was to achieve some unanimity within his own Ministry and move it from what he described as “the NCP regime” to a “Congress regime.” Indeed, at the meeting Mr. Thomas had when he visited the NAC headquarters on February 10, he indicated that there was resistance from the officials in the Ministry to the NAC's recommendations.
However, Mr. Thomas, government sources said, was of the view that since the United Progressive Alliance had made a commitment on food security, it would have to look for ways and means to honour it, despite the Rangarajan panel rejecting the idea of legal guarantees for the general category (otherwise described as the Above Poverty Line or APL), pointing to constraints of resources and availability of food grains.
Political dividends
Congress sources pointed out that the political dividends from providing food security only to what the NAC describes as “the priority category” (now described as Below Poverty Line or BPL) are limited, as this section is already getting subsidised food grains under the Public Distribution System (PDS). It is by extending this food security to the general — or APL — category (i.e., the lower middle class) that the UPA can get additional political dividends, as this was a more articulate class with a voice that could be heard.
Clearly, Mr. Thomas is hard at work already: on Saturday, at the National Conference on “Policy for food grains storage, handling and transportation,” he told journalists that he hoped the new Bill would be able to cover about 65 to 70 per cent of the population: the NAC wants 75 per cent of the population to be covered, while the Rangarajan panel wants only the BPL category to be given legal guarantees.
Mr. Thomas also told journalists that the issue of APL category too would have to be addressed, and said he would discuss this again with the Rangarajan panel. Currently, the government provides 35 kg of food grains to 6.52 crore BPL families through ration shops, with wheat being sold at Rs. 4.15 a kg and rice at Rs. 5.65.
More food grains
The Minister also stressed that since the government would have to procure more food grains to fulfil the promises to be made in the proposed bill, the storage capacity would have to be strengthened “through involvement of the private sector.”
Mr. Thomas added that his Ministry had proposed to the Finance Ministry to consider providing fiscal and tax incentives and other facilities in the coming budget to boost private investment in developing warehouse infrastructure.
