In Tray

Assuming a 22 mt rabi wheat procurement, the additional financial impact of the price hike, including state government taxes, will be about Rs 270 crore or so. Plus of course, there will be the impact on the buffer-carrying cost. But we cannot scrap the food security arrangement yet, nor can we leave the entire marketing operations to the farmers. We have to protect them against any crash in price. Offtake has been improving too. Till February, total offtake from the central pool was 26 mt and PDS accounted for 45 per cent of it. We also exported over 5 mt of wheat and 1.9 mt of rice so far. So, technically, less than half of the food subsidy is the actual subsidy. Even that is not a high figure for a country with high malnutrition.