Free grain to Indian poor
INDIA: India’s Agriculture Minister promised Tuesday that the
Government would carry out an order by the Supreme Court to distribute
grain to the poor instead of letting it rot in warehouses.
In early August the Supreme Court criticised the federal farmer’s
agency, the Food Corp of India, for failing to properly store India’s
massive grain stocks and told the Government to distribute the food to
the poor. “This Government will honour the decision of the Supreme
Court,” Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar told parliament after earlier
saying the directive was “impossible to implement”. The Supreme Court
reiterated Tuesday that its ruling had been “an order”. It said it was
“a crime to waste even a grain of food” as long as people were starving.
A recent Asian Development Bank report calculated the number of poor
people in India — those living on less than two dollars a day — stood at
around 651 million. Malnutrition among under-fives stands at 43.5
percent — worse than sub-Saharan Africa, according to government
figures. The Supreme Court also said that the government must urgently
build infrastructure for modern storage facilities across the country.
The court order came after Indian media reports exposed massive
wastage of government-bought grain across the country in Punjab, Uttar
Pradesh, Maharashtra and other states.
The Hindustan Times newspaper quoted an unidentified government
source as saying about 10 million tonnes of grain — enough to feed 118
million people for a year — were at risk of rotting. In 2009, the amount
of grain wasted in warehouses across the country totalled 16 million
tonnes, according to Food Corp of India. New Delhi, Wednesday, AFP
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