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The Ministry of Food and
Agriculture and Minister Sharad Pawar would be under immense pressure in the forthcoming Parliamentary session over the country's broken-down wheat management policy. Pawar get hammered on his Ministry's fumbling on managing, monitoring, and planning wheat production and storage levels, he will also be castigated for lack of adequate process in importing wheat.
The issue of shortage of wheat first came up early in the year and the Government's solution is to buy poorer quality wheat directly at higher prices to be delivered when Indian farmers will be harvesting their crop. While this debacle has thankfully not resulted in a price collapse thanks to overall lower wheat production and higher demand, the potential of this ad hoc decision-making creating havoc to local production is large. Additionally, this has also unfortunately set a precedent for future Governments to take recourse for knee-jerk procurement.
Even the low quality and higher priced wheat procured from Australia was reported to contain high residue of pesticides. The Ministry's response again was to get a certification on one parameter and an obscure announcement that India will downgrade its import quality levels for wheat. Apparently, the Ministry wants the Australian wheat very badly as the Public Distribution System stocks are at record lows from its target 4 million tons
(mt).
The Ministry failed again to predict lower wheat production even though Punjab has been repeatedly saying that wheat production may not exceed estimates at best. India has 2 mt in stock and plans to procure from local production 10 mt of wheat. Even with Pawar's plan to import 5.5 mt, there is a shortage of 2 mt of wheat when one considers the target 4 mt of reserve stock and national consumption levels of 1.3 mt per month. Thus with a total requirement of 19.5 mt of wheat (1.3 X 12 + 4), Pawar has only planned for 17.5
mt.
The Government plans to manage this shortfall by hedging procurement over the present and the September-October crop after the market has been flooded by harvests and large imports. Even though the prices are expected to crash, the Government will continue to buy at the boosted Rs. 700 a quintal so the farmers in the next election do not punish them.
With a serious shortfall in such stock levels, Pawar is taking some very unusual steps. He is capping the amount of wheat states can take, canceling distribution of wheat for the much-publicized National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, and cutting back on PDS quota for welfare schemes by substituting rice for wheat. This may also lead to another round of debate whether PDS quota for Above the Poverty Line (ABL) families from 35 kilograms a month to 20. The Federal Cabinet had apparently approved this plan but was paused because of the state-level elections and any move to deny entitlement will be punished harshly by the population used to free bies. The saving grace is that the Below the Poverty Line (BPL) population may continue to be shielded from price fluctuations.
Pawar has congratulated himself by calling the food management system as "ultra efficient" but that is far from the truth. By distributing pain across states and populations he is trying to hide the poor management of food and agriculture by his Ministry.
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