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To check spiralling prices of pulses, the Centre on Saturday urged the States to exempt it from value-added tax (VAT) and other local taxes.
“It may help cool the prices of the pulses by 5-7 per cent,” Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said while briefing the media after a meeting of State Food Minister here to draw an action plan to check prices of essentials, such as pulses, edible oil and sugar. The meeting was also attended by Union Minister for Agriculture Radha Mohan Singh.
An official statement said the State Food Ministers’ conference also noted that the prices of the specified food items, such as pulses, sugar, edible oils shoot up abnormally due to hoarding, profiteering and cartelling by traders and middlemen, with farmers ending up as the biggest losers.
“Therefore, there is a need that all States and Union Territories impose and implement stock limits, which should follow a logical and scientific formula separately in consuming States and surplus States ,” he added.
The meeting adopted an action plan to improve availability and contain prices of essential food items, which includes rationalisation of imposition of stock limits, streamlining of the price monitoring mechanism, utilisation of full potential of the Price Stabilisation Fund (PSF) and States to consider setting up own PSFs.
Sugar
On prices of sugar, Paswan said he had written to the chief Ministers of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu requesting them to keep a close watch on the release and stock held by sugar mills to ensure domestic availability.
“The production-linked export incentive scheme has been withdrawn midway to ensure adequate availability of the sugar in the domestic market. The States have been asked to implement stock limit effectively,” he added.
The Centre has also decided to strengthen the price monitoring mechanism by including more markets for collecting price data, the Minister said.
Addressing the meeting, the Agriculture Minister called for increasing the production of pulses.
States were also urged to seed Aadhaar numbers of the beneficiaries into the database to make it error free and weed out bogus ration cards, as also adopt and implement an online system for management of foodgrain procurement.
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