Silos for grain storage

The Centre’s decision to store all foodgrains in a scientific manner by the coming March by doing away with the unscientific cover and plinth (CAP) method of stocking is the best New Year resolution that our country could have made. For, it holds the promise of protection of every hard-produced grain and the implied assurance of it reaching every citizen with minimal losses in the plough-to-plate journey. The Centre must expedite efforts to resolve the ‘policy paralysis’ afflicting Punjab over the nitty-gritties regarding the functioning of some silos built by private players in the state. Grains under unscientific storage include around 19.6 lakh metric tonnes (MT) in Punjab and 9.4 lakh MT in Haryana.

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The woeful shortfall in the scientific storage infrastructure for stocking lakhs of tonnes of the staple crops — mainly wheat and rice — has resulted in a criminally huge loss of grains. It is shameful that the country is home to the largest number of food-insecure people in the world despite producing bumper crops. Their plight is rendered more pitiable as the situation is to an extent attributable to the lack of proper stocking of the produce for consumption later. Punjab alone has seen a sharp increase in damage to foodgrains: from 8 tonnes lost in 2016-17, to 211 tonnes in 2017-18 and 318 tonnes in 2018-19. Even as we, decades ago, graduated from being a grain-importing nation to one with surplus production following the shift to scientific and mechanised farming practices, the failure to keep pace in building silos alongside has caused massive damage every year as grains lay exposed to the vagaries of weather or infestation by rats and other pests.

The Centre must overcome all hurdles and deliver on its pledge of setting up enough silos in Punjab, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh — the key producer states — to help in feeding the country’s 1.4 billion people, plus having sizeable quantities of grains left over for export. China achieved such a status after ensuring scientific crop storage two decades ago. It’s high time we followed suit.