Enough food to feed 100 million people rots away

M Today

Chandigarh, Sept 2:  The wheat lies in the sun. Lakhs of bags of it. The stamp on the jute bags says "2010-2011." This batch of wheat is produced from a crop that’s just three months old.  It’s rotting away.
 
"This is the first time wheat has been stored here in the open. Earlier they stored it in a pucca plinth. Now there are more than 1.5 lakh bags out here," says the watchman, at Thol Storage in Haryana.

 

The wheat should be stored at warehouses owned by the government. But year after year, the warehouses in Punjab and Haryana run out of room. There is no silver lining to this problem of excess, mainly because the government has persistently ignored it. This year, heavy rain and water logging mean that the grain is rotting faster than usual.  The plastic sheets thrown carelessly around the bags of wheat are totemic of the sort of systematic carelessness that a desperately poor and hungry nation is cursed with.

In March, NDTV travelled to warehouses scattered in Sirhind, Anandpur Sahib, Ludhiana, Sangrur. The stench rose sharp and thick from the grain rotting outside. There were rats and snakes crawling among the grain. Embarrassed by the profuse evidence of its lack of concern and initiative, the government has now floated tenders, looking for new warehouses both in Punjab and Haryana that can house an additional 70 lakh metric tons of wheat.



For now, the facts are damning. Currently, in Punjab and Haryana, by official accounts, 100 lakh metric tons of grain has been stored in the open. According to an estimate, 10 per cent of this is rotting. That’s enough to feed 100 million people for three months.
 
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court made its stand clear to Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, stating that earlier this month, when it asked him to ensure excess grain is given to poor people, it wasn’t offering a suggestion. Find a way to implement the order, the judges said.
 
Mr Pawar told an angry Parliament hours later that he welcomed suggestions from them on how to distribute grain to poor families.
 
A solution to distribute the grain - perhaps through ration shops - cannot come soon enough. In Madhya Pradesh, six out of every ten children suffer from diseases caused by hunger or malnutrition.