Kerala - Kochi   

Pawar’s remarks ‘unconstitutional’, says Prabhat Patnaik

Prabhat Patnaik

KOCHI: State Planning Board Vice-Chairman Prabhat Patnaik has lambasted Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar for turning down Kerala’s request to restore its ration rice quota.

“Mr. Pawar has abandoned his constitutional responsibility of running the public distribution system (PDS) and ensuring the food security of the nation,” Dr. Patnaik told The Hindu on Friday.

“It is irresponsible to ask the States to find their own food supplies to run the PDS,” he said. “Then what is the Central government for? How about the States raising their own armies too? What if Kerala says it will not hand over the huge amounts of foreign exchange it earns every year?”

He said that Kerala’s allocation for subsidised food grains under the PDS had been reduced by a mammoth 82 per cent. This had severely reduced rice availability, jacked up rice price and hit food security. On Friday, Kerala MPs raised the issue in Parliament and staged a dharna in front of Parliament House. Kerala, a perennially food-shortage State, had been pressing the Centre to restore its quota, but Mr. Pawar on Wednesday had utterly rejected it.

Dr. Patnaik recalled that Andhra Pradesh’s quota had been reduced by 10 per cent, but when Congress politicians in the State had protested, the quota was restored. He said the food grains procurement system and the PDS had run successfully for four decades. India had the world’s largest procurement system outside of the socialist block.

“It was a marvellous system, but it now stands dismantled,” he said. “The systematic assault on this mechanism by a bunch of neo-liberal ideologues led to its collapse,” he said.

The NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee had replaced the PDS with the Targeted PDS, which split the PDS beneficiaries into below poverty line (BPL) and above poverty line (APL). A large section of BPL people were put in the APL category. “The Planning Commission’s BPL category determination is a big joke,” he said.

Dr. Patnaik said the drastic reduction in the food buffer stock maintained by the Food Corporation of India, on the plea of cutting down on inventory cost, was one of the reasons for the present food crisis.

Again, the huge cut in the procurement price of food grains had led to a reduction in production, as the cut in the price proved to be a disincentive for the farmers.

Dr. Patnaik said Kerala needed to reverse its farming strategy of focussing on cash crops. Back in the 1960s, based on Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s advice that Kerala should go in for cash crops so that India could earn more foreign exchange and the rest of the country could take care of the State’s food needs, the farmers had shifted to raising cash crops. This, according to Dr. Patnaik, was a wrong step as it resulted in a situation where the State could produce only a fraction of its food grain needs.

He suggested that Kerala should go back to rice cultivation in a big way and use every available piece of land for producing rice and other food items. “It is not safe to totally depend on other States for your food needs,” he said. “Let us reverse the strategy, let us start raising food crops.” He said very few food crop farmers had committed suicide in the country, the majority of those ending their lives were commercial crop farmers.

Dr. Patnaik said there was no need for the State to hand over the rice it procured to be handed over to the Central pool. This rice should be distributed within the State. “I do not think the Centre expects a food-shortage State like Kerala to hand over the rice it procured,” he said.

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