{"id":4657,"date":"2019-10-18T21:46:04","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T16:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/?p=4657"},"modified":"2019-10-18T21:46:04","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T16:16:04","slug":"giving-away-fci-grains-as-aid-a-temporary-solution-price-support-and-pds-reforms-key-in-long-term","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/giving-away-fci-grains-as-aid-a-temporary-solution-price-support-and-pds-reforms-key-in-long-term\/","title":{"rendered":"Giving away FCI grains as aid a temporary solution; price support and PDS reforms key in\u00a0long-term"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Relevance: Mains: G.S paper II: Schemes and policies analysis<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Unless the Centre considers reforming its MPS and PDS policies, replacing them with, say, DBT for food and cost-support to farmers, respectively, India will keep facing this problem.<\/p>\n<p>With FCI\u2019s grains stock hitting unmanageable levels, the food ministry has asked the external affairs ministry to explore the possibility of giving away some of the stock to \u201cdeserving countries\u201d as aid. India has done this before, but at a much smaller scale than what is probably envisaged now.<\/p>\n<p>Giving away the grains\u2014for a country ranked very low on the Global Hunger Index, this may not be great optics\u2014is still a better option than allowing it to rot. Rather, the government should be thinking of reforming its procurement\/price support policy.<\/p>\n<p>Against stocking norms requiring just 307.7 lakh metric tonnes (mt) to be held in the central pool on October 1, the total was 669.15 lakh.<\/p>\n<p>Worse, thanks to bad policy, FCI\u2019s outstanding debt in FY19 stood at `2.2 lakh crore.<\/p>\n<p>Procurement policy has meant that existing storage remains perpetually inadequate. One solution is to liquidate the huge surplus, but FCI\u2019s open market sales scheme failed to take off as prices of wheat and rice in the open market don\u2019t cover the economic costs of FCI procurement and storage.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Worse, exports also can\u2019t be an option\u2014even when the grain-quality issue is overlooked\u2014because the price support policy means exports won\u2019t meet WTO norms. Unless the Centre considers reforming its MPS and PDS policies, replacing them with, say, DBT for food and cost-support to farmers, respectively, India will keep facing this problem.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Relevance: Mains: G.S paper II: Schemes and policies analysis Unless the Centre considers reforming its MPS and PDS policies, replacing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123,18],"tags":[392],"class_list":["post-4657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current-affairs","category-general-studies-ii","tag-union-public-service-commission-upsc"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4658,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4657\/revisions\/4658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/triumphias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}