Rupashree Nanda; CNN-IBN; Nov 23, 2010,
New Delhi: An RTI filed by CNN-IBN has revealed Food Corporation of India's (FCI) unscientific food storage policy that lead to rotting of 67 thousand metric tonnes of foodgrains. The grains rotted despite crores of rupees having been spent on open storage spaces instead of godowns.
The rotted grains were almost one third of India's food reserves. They were dumped in the open and wasted. But the government called it the "indigenous" method of storing foodgrains.
But after India lost around 67,000 metric tonnes of foodgrain, there is a U-turn in policy.
letter dated August 30, 2010 from the Food Ministry to the FCI now available to CNN-IBN says, "The Minister (referring to Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar) feels that after recent experiences of damage to foodgrains kept in uncovered storage, construction of new plinths, or platforms for outdoor storage, should be discouraged."
So what took Sharad Pawar so long?
But it was shockingly shortsighted policy. In 2009, the FCI created 4 lakh metric tonnes of open storage space spending Rs 14 crore. in 2010 too, it will spend Rs 4 crore on open storage for another 1.2 lakh metric tons. But during the same period it has invested in covered storage that will house just 0.6 lakh metric tons.
Even as FCI went on building open storage, its own internal correspondence kept raising red flags about the method. Even as doubts grew about open storage, the FCI had yet another bizarre idea.
So severe was the space crunch that FCI was actively looking at storing foodgrain uncovered, on unused roads.
Between the FCI and the Government there was no clear thinking or concern on how to preserve precious foodgrain in a country of a billion people more than half of whom are starving.
Decisions are easily changed inside government files, but it plays havoc on the ground, putting the country's food reserves at a huge risk.
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