To ease the pressure of procuring foodgrains like wheat and rice and maintaining huge stocks in their own godowns, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) is planning to set up a special cell which will advise State governments and farmers to diversify into other crops like oilseeds. In an exclusive interview with The Indian Express, V. K. Malhotra, the new managing director of FCI said: ‘‘There is no point if the government, through the FCI, spends so much money on buying wheat and rice beyond the prudential buffer stock requirements and on the other hand spends precious foreign exchange to buy oilseeds. What is required is that farmers are educated to grow produce which will help them earn their support price but in product categories for which there is a demand in the market”.Malhotra, on a major clean-up operation in the corporation, says that FCI, despite the negative reports that it gets, has been performing a mammoth operation in the country by moving 82 million tonnes of grain through the length and breadth of the country and handling a turnover of Rs 64,000 crore. ‘‘Our main task is to manage the food security issue, and that task is being completed though there is always scope for improvement,’’ he says.‘‘We often hear that the quality of FCI wheat is bad, but we are exporting our grains to foreign countries and the quality cannot be that bad,’’ Malhotra explains. He however says : ‘‘There is lack of infrastructure in terms of railway rakes as well as storage space and it is here that we have our problems. We have now decided that FCI will handover the work of building of warehouses to the Central Warehousing Corporation the specialised body which can then go ahead and plan building of these godowns. Specialisation in the areas of work is important to meet targets.’’Malhotra admits that there have been problems within the corporation like the fact that the FCI has not finalised its annual reports for the last three years, a fact reported by this newspaper earlier. ‘‘FCI has been treated as an extension of the government wherein the subsidy from the government to farmers is routed through us. As a result often the FCI has not behaved like a company under the Company’s Act. But we are correcting all of this now and the backlog is more or less up to date now and very soon we should be able to table these reports in Parliament.’’
