That familiar stink

PICTURES of grains rotting in rain are regularly splashed in the media but these have ceased to evoke a sense of shock or outrage and produce predictable official reaction. A CAG report tabled in Parliament on Friday has studied the Central scheme to augment storage capacity between 2011 and 2016 and pointed to a Rs 700-crore grain loss in Punjab. For cereals at least there is some system in place for procurement and storage, even if it is highly inefficient and corrupt. For other farm products such as fruits and vegetables there is no proper supply chain, private or public. As a result, up to 30 per cent fruits and vegetables go waste. 

Malnutrition is rampant in the country because of high prices of food. A lot of physical effort, water, soil nutrients and capital go into producing every crop. All that come to naught because a handful of officials cannot do the job they are paid for. It is a criminal waste of food, produced with the farmer's sweat and subsidised with the taxpayer's money. The food subsidy in 2015-16 amounted to Rs 1,03,283 crore. This had grown 53 per cent in five years — not because there were more mouths to feed but because the Centre either did not release the full subsidy amount to the FCI or delayed it. Consequently, the FCI was forced to pay Rs 35,700 crore additional interest on loans it took to complete the procurement job.

This is not an isolated incident of official irresponsibility or mismanagement. All that goes on in the name of food procurement is kept hidden from the public eye as far as possible. It is only agencies like the CAG that occasionally bare a part of the rot. But for a more demanding Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, the Rs 12,000 crore food scam in Punjab would not have come to light. How — and whether — the Centre and the previous Akali Dal-BJP government covered up everything with a Rs 31,000 crore loan remains unexplained, even under the present dispensation in Punjab.