This refers to the editorial “Hunger for ideas” (January 31). It is well known that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the finance ministry are hungry for ideas to control food inflation.
High inflation can be attributed to several factors. First, when the government starts exporting food items like onion, tomato and wheat, it adds to the price rise. Second, the high cost of petrol and, consequently, transportation, has rendered food items less remunerative. For example, vegetables are grown in fields in rural areas. Vegetable production can be doubled but the cost of labour that puts the vegetables into gunny bags, loads the product on to tractors or trucks and the cost of transporting vegetables to the market make vegetables non-remunerative. Third, most of our eminent economists are educated at foreign universities — they have no experience in, say, eliminating poverty in Indian villages. Also, the central government programmes in villages go unmonitored. For example, the government has started distributing wheat through the public distribution system. But there are many points that cannot be detected by the government because most people in villages neither complain nor make any suggestions since nobody in the government listens. But none of the reasons indicated in your editorial are the real causes of food inflation.
S C Aggarwal, New Delhi