NEW DELHI, SEP 9: In this time of Kalyug, it's probably the closest you'll get to the young Sidhartha getting moved by the plight of the poor, and eventually attaining Nirvana as Gautam Buddha. Believe it or not, what made food minister Shanta Kumar make his grand announcement of giving free food for the poor was an article on Redifff.com - again, a sign of the changing times we live in - which talked of how Laxmi Matiari, a starving mother of four in Samantrapalli in rural Orissa, sold her month-old baby for Rs 20 to an acquaintance. Shanta Kumar, who has enclosed this news item in a letter he wrote to Planning Commission Deputy Chairman K.C. Pant, then goes on to say that feeding these `daridra narayans' will be a `holy task' performed by the government. Kumar had asked Pant to help identify these `poorest gods' or `helpless, orphans and beggar class of people' who cannot even afford ration shop grain at the vastly subsidised rate for people below the poverty line. Laxmi, the Rediff story goes on to say, has a below-poverty-line ration card, but did not have the Rs 100 needed to purchase 16 kg of rice she was entitled to. While identifying these people is going to be a gargantuan task in itself, what Shanta Kumar's largesse covers up is the main reason for this sudden generosity. The reason is simple. The government's granaries are overflowing, and unless it empties them out fast, it simply won't have enough storage space to accomodate the new grain that the procurement agencies will be buying over the next couple of months! Linked to this, and something that Shanta Kumar won't tell you, is the cost of the largesse. Very simply, over the last couple of years, the government has been buying far more wheat and rice from farmers than it needs for the public distribution system and for buffer stock operations - last year, the recommended stock levels were 24 million tonnes of foodgrains, but it actually stocked 35 million tonnes. Based on the average cost incurred by the procurement agencies of Rs 1,890 per tonne per year, the cost of storing the additional grain was a whopping Rs 2,100 crore last year. This year, till August, the food stocks were a whopping 43 million tonnes - for the half year, this means another Rs 2,000 crore of additional cost. This could go up to Rs 4,000 crore if the excess stock situation remains the same. Calculated another way, the cost of this free food also adds up to in the region of Rs 4,000 crore. Under Shanta Kumar's scheme, 8 per cent of the total number of families in the country are to be given 20 kg of wheat/rice per month - that totals to 38.4 million tonnes a year. Given that the `economic cost' or the cost to government of these foodgrains is around Rs 10,400 per tonne - Rs 9,000 for wheat and Rs 11,800 for rice - the total cost of this foodgrain adds up to Rs 3,993 crore.
