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Journalism of Courage
With inflation crossing the double-digit mark—11.05 per cent—after over a decade on Friday, the Government announced the launch of a new scheme to sell subsidised edible oils to all ration card holders through fair-price shops from next month.
An empowered group of ministers (EGoM) headed by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee has already approved the scheme, and government agencies have been contracted to import about 1.8 lakh tones of edible oil. The exercise, which will cost about Rs 1,500 crore to the Government in the current fiscal, is will be launched from Congress-ruled Andhra Pradesh. Under it, 10 lakh tonnes of imported edible oil will be made available to states, with 1 kg allocated to each ration card at a subsidy of Rs 15. Sates that will benefit from the scheme are Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Orissa, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura and West Bengal.
The move to introduce edible oils under the public distribution system is not only aimed at providing the relief to poorer sections of the population, but also to give a boost to the waning popularity of the Government, which has come under severe attack for rising prices.
However, there is a very real possibility that the ambitious scheme could be hijacked by black marketers because of the various channels that the oil will have to travel through — the fact
that it will be supplied to the state governments through the Central Government-owned agencies entrusted to import it may prove to be problematic.
The country meets about 40 per cent of its total edible oil consumption of about 12 million tonnes through imports. About 3.5 million tonnes of palm oil is imported annually from Malaysia and Indonesia, but there has been a sharp rise in the price of the commodity since last year. As a response, the Government, in March, had announced a cut on import duty on crude palm oil from 45 to 20 per cent and that on refined palm oil from 52.5 to 27.5 per cent.
