30 September 2000

PDS LEAKAGES ALARMING, POOR NOT BENEFITED, SAYS PLANNING COMMISSION

From Jal Khambata

NEW DELHI: In a stunning admission of failure of the public distribution system (PDS), the Mid-term Appraisal of the Ninth Five Year Plan released by the Planning Commission says "all is not well" with the system as "there is 36 per cent diversion of wheat, 31 per cent diversion of rice and 23 per cent diversion of sugar from the system at the national level."

The Appraisal also points out that the much-touted scheme of providing foodgrains to families below poverty line (BPL) at half the price and doubling of allocation to the poorer states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Assam did not help "due to poor off-take by the states and even poorer actual lifting by the BPL families."

Besides the problem of illegal diversion, the Appraisal pointed out that the poor do not have cash to buy 20 kilos at a time. It also faulted the lack of transparency and inadequate accountability of the implementing officials and pointed out that poor do not get foodgrains at the government prices as "price charged often exceeds the official price by 10 to 14 per cent."

Foodgrain production has shot up from 175 million tonnes to 206 million tonnes in the 90s but the availability per capita has gone down and much alarming was the steep fall in the food consumption of the poor in the last ten years. It is at least 33 per cent below compared to per capita consumption of the top 10 per cent, the Appraisal document point out.

The remedy that the Planning Commission has recommended is to distribute freely the foodgrains lying in the government godowns to fight "rampant malnutrition among the vulnerable sections of the society." Let the foodstocks be reduced to roughly half its present level and use it for reducing malnutrition," the Appraisal stressed. It, however, admits that this would require several legal and policy changes before the scheme could be implemented.

Among the recommendations incorporated in the Appraisal document, the most stunning is an advice to the government to lift the ban on future trading of agricultural commodities. The Planning Commission had in the past favoured ban to prevent speculators shooting up prices affecting public but now it says lifting of the same ban "will help in containing the wide fluctuations in commodity prices, besides cutting down the cost of marketing by hedging their risk."

Other key recommendations are:

-- Enact a Central Act banning the state government's powers to control or restrict trade of agricultural commodities. (Common markets, all over the world, are coming into vogue transcending political boundaries of the nation states. The entire country should be treated as one big market instead of putting restrictions on inter-state movement of agricultural commodities.)

-- Decontrol sugar fully and take it out of PDS.

-- Scrap Essential Commodities Act at an early date or "at least, wheat, rice and sugar should immediately be taken out of its purview."

-- Abolish or phase out levy which acts as a tax ultimately passed on to either producers or consumers and the government should buy rice for its PDS through an open tender system. END