Photo courtesy: jagran.com
In the midst of the general elections – the biggest festival of democracy – the wheat harvesting season has been on a full swing. While the official data of how much wheat is produced in the food bowl – comprising Punjab and Haryana – will take some time to be finalised, initial estimates point to an expectation of a record harvest of 310-lakh tonnes.
Punjab is expecting an output of 180-lakh tonnes of wheat while neighbouring Haryana is anticipating a bumper harvest of 130-lakh tonnes. With an extended winter, the wheat harvest was certainly delayed but it helped increase crop productivity. Punjab is expecting a record yield of 52 quintals per hectare this year, against a national average of 32 quintals. But the excitement over a bumper wheat crop stands dampened because of an acute shortage of adequate and proper storage. Spilling over the outer rim of the mandis, heaps of wheat grain is stacked along the highways as you drive through parts of the food bowl. Such is the heavy arrival of wheat every day that hundreds of unopened bags of the grain are kept in the open waiting for procurement operations to begin.
At the peak of the wheat harvesting season, Punjab has hardly any covered storage available for the new wheat stock. Already, 12-lakh tonnes of previous year’s wheat stock is lying in the open, technically called as ‘covered and plinth’ (CAP) storage, which means grain bags stacked under the open sky and covered with a black tarpaulin cover. Punjab has a total of 158.5 lakh tonnes of covered storage capacity, of which 143-lakh tonnes is already occupied with rice and wheat procured in the last crop season. Additionally it has 75 lakh tonnes of CAP storage, of which 12 lakh tonnes is occupied from the previous stock. Further, it is expecting the arrival of 20 to 22 wagons of milled rice from rice millers. Rice being vulnerable to storage losses is always stored in the covered space or in other words will always get a first preference for being stored in godowns or in silos.
The story is the same year after year. With an expectation of 132-lakh tonnes of wheat to be procured, much of the purchased stocks will lie in the open this year. Last year too, about 20-lakh tonnes of carryover stock of wheat was already lying in the open when the fresh arrivals began to pour into the mandis. I remember at the peak of the procurement season nearly 70-lakh tonnes of the fresh arrivals were to be kept in the open under CAP storage. This was primarily because of the inability to move out previous year’s purchase of rice and wheat. In other words, roughly 90-lakh tonnes of wheat were kept in the open last year, of which 12 lakh tonnes is still lying in the open.
The situation may ease a little as the effort is to move the stored grains out of the state as quickly as possible. “We are hopeful of vacating storage space by the time the procurement season ends,” said K A P Sinha, Principal Secretary, food and civil supplies, Punjab, as quoted in a newspaper. I can understand the bureaucratic hassle that the state administration has to face every year, and that too twice in a year – once at the time of wheat arrivals and the next storage crisis emerging a few months later at the time of paddy procurement. Still more damming is the fact that the grain storage crisis has in reality been worsening with each passing year. At least for thirty years, I have seen how severely mismanaged food storage operations have been. Setting up yearly targets of food production has been a policy agenda but managing every single grain of wheat and rice procured has been the lowest among the political priorities.
This strange paradox of plenty – bumper harvests and mounting food wastage – defies all laws of what constitutes food management. I don’t know how policy makers can keep their eyes closed to the mammoth food wastage that it results in. Somehow I have always felt that reducing food wastage is a task that is expected only from a farmer; for the government, wasting the precious foodgrains procured appears to be an unfettered right. The callousness with which food quality of stored grain is allowed to deteriorate, often rendering it unfit for human consumption, is a matter of national shame.
After all, it doesn’t require any rocket science to build grain storage, including silos. Every time I hear the government investing money to build infrastructure, strangely I find it invariably ends with bulk of the money being pumped in to build super highways. I am not against expanding the network of highways but there are numerous other areas which are crying for public sector investments. It was in 2017 that the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced an economic stimulus package of Rs 6.92-lakh crore for building 83, 677 kms of roads by 2022.
If only he had kept aside Rs 1-lakh crore out of the Rs 6.92-lakh crore that he allocated for building roads, and instead pumped in this money to build foodgrain storage capacity, he would have solved the long pending problem of colossal food wastage accruing from lack of proper grain storage facilities. Earlier, the UPA government had constructed panchayat gharin each of the nearly 2.5 lakh panchayatsacross the country. Even at that time, I had sought adequate investment in building food silos across the country. After all, the television images of food rotting in the godowns or food bags lying in pools of water in the mandis is an unforgivable sight. More so, at a time when India ranks 103 among 119 countries in the Global Hunger Index. Nearly a fourth of the world’s hungry population lives in India, in a country which allows abundant food supplies to go waste for lack of adequate storage. I still don’t know why finding a permanent solution to address the monumental problem of food wastage has never been a political priority. #
रिकॉर्ड पैदावार के अनुमानों के बीच खुले में बर्बाद होते अन्न की कहानी. Amar Ujala. May 7, 2019
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