4-tier body to keep food mission on right track

Even as the Government has launched the Food Security Mission targeting 305 districts in 16 states to cut the import of major foodgrains in the country...

Even as the Government has launched the Food Security Mission (FSM) targeting 305 districts in 16 states to cut the import of major foodgrains in the country, it has identified huge productivity gaps which threaten to derail the mission. To bridge these gaps and make a visible impact on the ground with the Rs 3,640 crore allocated for wheat and rice in the districts, the Agriculture Ministry is planning a four-tier outcome-based monitoring mechanism.

In case of wheat, while the productivity level of 138 districts is about 15 per cent below the average national productivity levels, the difference is a whopping 44 per cent below the Punjab productivity levels. No wonder then that while the identified regions comprise more than 49 per cent of the area under wheat, they contribute only 42 per cent to the total wheat production.

Similarly, the rice productivity levels of 131 districts identified under the mission are about 20 per cent below the average national productivity levels, but are 55 per cent below that of Punjab. So while the identified regions comprise over 47 per cent of the area under rice, they contribute only about 37 per cent to the total rice production.

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According to official sources in the Agriculture Ministry, the four-tier plan will include forming a General Council headed by the Union Agriculture Minister, which will be the apex policy-making body at the national level and will provide direction and guidance to the FSM. A National FSM Executive Committee headed by the Agriculture Secretary, which will work under the General Council at the national level, would be the executive body which will monitor and operationalise state-specific plans.

While the above two tiers will provide broad guidelines from the national level, sources reveal that the states will be asked either to nominate or create an autonomous agency registered under the Societies Act that will be responsible for implementing it at the state level. On the ground, a district FSM Executive Committee will be constituted under the district collectors or zila panchayat heads, which will formulate the district projects and implement them.

While the ministry is still in the process of finalising the guidelines, the execution of the mission will be a time-bound exercise, where each tier would have to meet monitorable physical and financial targets and raise the wheat and rice production by 8 million tonnes and 10 million tonnes respectively during the next four years.