Plan panel to give food security cost proposals to EGoM

India’s proposed food security law will cost between Rs 44,000 crore and Rs 1,00,000 crore depending on the quantity of food grains and the number of people the government wants to feed, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 23, 2010, 24:01:55 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s proposed food security law will cost between Rs 44,000 crore and Rs 1,00,000 crore depending on the quantity of food grains and the number of people the government wants to feed.

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# Planning Commission to present to the Empowered Group of Ministers five or six different scenarios with the food subsidy cost to the government.

# The plan panel note has cost scenarios for providing subsidised ration, either 25 kg or 35 kg, to the existing poverty estimate and as per the Tendulkar committee recommendations.

The Planning Commission is expected to present a note on food subsidy cost to the Empowered Group of Ministers on Friday and recommend giving 35 kg food grains to each below-poverty-line (BPL) family.

The EGoM had reviewed its decision to provide 25 kg food grains to the existing 300 million BPL families following the intervention of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi. The group decided to consider giving 35 kg food grains, which poor families get at present, and asked the plan panel to present a paper on the poverty estimate.

The panel is likely to tell the EGoM that it has accepted the Tendulkar committee recommendation of categorising 400 million Indians as poor and will present financial scenarios for distributing food grain at Rs 3 per kg. “Five or six different scenarios with the subsidy cost to the government has been worked out,” a senior Planning Commission official told HT.

The note has cost scenarios for providing subsidised ration, either 25 kg or 35 kg, to the existing poverty estimate and as per the Tendulkar committee recommendations.

Plan panel deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia also discussed revamping the public distribution system with food ministry officials and the possibility of using the Unique Identification Number to plug leakages.

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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