Govt works out plan to dispose of excess rice procured

livemint.com:

rice that is distributed free to the poor under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKY), two officials said. The proposal was seen as too expensive and labour intensivein the absence of sifters, graders and other machinery. Proposals on the table now includes increasing the allocation of rice under PMGKY, giving free food to employees of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), and reducing the price of rice under the open market sales scheme (OMSS).

The government normally procures about 12.5-15 million tonnes (mt) of excess rice each year, which it then offloads under public distribution system (PDS) and other welfare schemes and in the open market under the government-controlled OMSS. But it has struggledto find buyers for the past two years because of the high price set by it under OMSS. The same variety of rice that is offered by FCI is available in the market for less than ₹29 a kg–the price at which it is sold under the OMSS.

The Centre, through its procuring agency FCI, bought 46.3 million tonnes of rice in the 2023-24 Kharif season against the annual requirement of 40 mt for welfare schemes. The government currently has 31.8 mt of rice in its stock, against the 13.5 mt norm as of 1 April – an excess of 18.3 mt. Higher than the required stocks involve extra storage facilities and large maintenance costs.

The government was earlier planning to revise its specifications for rice distribution under PMGKY by procuring rice with 10% broken and 15% broken grains separately, thus ensuring a better quality of rice. The existing policy of procurement of rice allows the broken rice proportion to be 25%. “To tide over the problem of managing surplus rice stocks, it was