THE government stocks a fifth of its grain out in the open, left to be washed by the monsoon. As the UPA’s most ambitious welfare programme — food security for poor Indians — is unrolled, more grain will be collected and allowed to rot unless warehouses are built to stock an additional 35 million tonnes…. The food security scheme proposes to sell grain to two out of every three Indians at a fraction of the price the government buys it from farmers. The food ministry estimates the country would need to invest Rs350,000 crore over time in improving grain yield. The country does not produce enough grain to be sold cheap to three-quarters of India’s 1.2 billion people, as initially proposed in the food security scheme. If we do manage to find the grain, we don’t have the granaries to stock it…. The government is holding 56 million tonnes of rice and wheat this January, against a buffer requirement of 25 million tonnes.

Nearly seven per cent of Indian grain rots in fields and granaries. The refrigeration that would preserve all this food is non-existent…. Investment in cold chains has not materialised because India does not allow foreign supermarkets to sell farm produce.

Rising farm prices are a reflection of productivity gains in manufacturing and services that have completely sidestepped Indian agriculture. There is scope to introduce capital and technology at the periphery in, say, how food travels from the farm to the plate and in how farmers contract to sell their harvests. These can be achieved without doing too much violence to the basic structure of Indian agriculture.—(May 4)