Overflowing granaries

Shanta Kumar panel's recommendations have been ignored

With the government’s foodgrain coffers brimming over and more stocks pouring in regularly, thanks to an open-ended grain procurement policy, the country’s food surplus has become unmanageable. By official reckoning, the total inventories in the Central grain pool are close to twice the desired stockpiling of 41.1 million tonnes in the beginning of June. Though the fiscal load of the excess stocks is hard to assess precisely as it keeps varying with size of inventories, duration of storage and procurement incidentals, rough estimates put it at over Rs 1 trillion. The carrying cost and the interest on the funds spent