Food Security Bill back on govt table

The UPA poll promise of a Food Security Bill is back on the cards with the government expecting better agricultural growth in 2010 and a fall in food prices.

Updated on: Feb 11, 2010, 01:56:04 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The UPA poll promise of a Food Security Bill is back on the cards with the government expecting better agricultural growth in 2010 and a fall in food prices.

“The worst is over as far as food inflation is concerned,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a conference of chief ministers on Saturday. The good crop prospects and Indian prices being broadly in line with international prices, the PM was confident that food prices would stabilise.

With this, the government has called a meeting of Group of Ministers (GoM) on Food Security Bill — put on hold because of 2009 drought — to discuss the basic tenets of the proposed law on Friday. Finance Minister Pranab Mukerjee, who heads the GoM, is expected to make some announcement in the budget this month end.

The proposed law aims at covering all residents but before that the government wants to strengthen the public distribution system (PDS), which the PM described as outdated, to plug leakages. As per the governments estimates there is 30-40 per cent pilferage of food grains in the PDS system.

According to government officials, an important issue on the agenda of the GoM is the initial draft of the proposed bill.

However, the issue of who would be entitled for the subsidised food is yet to be settled. The government is looking at whether only below poverty line families should be covered or all, irrespective of income. There is a view that the government may find it difficult to fund subsidised food for all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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