I was watching news today and was amazed to see the amount of food grains getting wasted at various FCI storage houses.
The problem is storing double the amount of food grains at the godowns than its regular capacity. Even the animals refuse to consume the contaminated and wasted food grains. The official’s response to the waste is they are looking into the issue. I guess that’s the patent statement of every official these days. I find it very difficult to understand with bumper production, people are still dying of hunger.
The FCI is responsible for making the procurement policies and distribution of food supplies to the entire population. The failure of the system from bribery, lack of enough procurement centers to overflow of supplies at the government godowns has lead to wastage of food grains across the country. This has led to increase in the food inflation rate to 17% which is at an all time high. In a country with about 50 million acres of irrigated land that’s second highest after US which has about 60 Million acres of irrigated land. This highlights an important fact that underutilization is not the issue but the lack of infrastructure facilities has led to this issue
India’s total population is close to 1.15 billion in 2010. And about 25% of the population still lives below the poverty line. That amounts to around 287 million of the total population struggling for the basic needs in life. Almost all the states in India are having a serious level of hunger.
As a country we have been blessed with abundant natural resources. It’s time to dig our heads and money in building cost effective technologies and infrastructure facilities to avoid these wastages.
