The Food Security Bill in the current form being tabled by the Centre in the Parliament will adversely affect the country’s food supply chain during the succeeding years, National President for BJP’s Kisan Morcha Omprakash Dhankar cautioned on Monday.
‘During the first year of implementation of the Food Security law, the Centre would manage to meet the requirement of food grains from the scores of country's godowns. However, from the second year onwards, there would be a shortfall in food grain stocks with its adverse impact on the country food supply chain,’ he said while addressing a news conference here.
Dhankar said that the Centre is ready to provide Rs 1.43 lakh crore of subsidies to the farmers but does not care about securing country’s food supply chain by getting them better price for their produce.
He said that the Centre should adopt the Chhattisgarh model of Food Security law which is the best in the country.
The Chhattisgarh Government is spending Rs 1,000 crore for providing the food grains to the beneficiairies with an additional distribution of Rs 1,900 crore as bonus to the farmers, Dhankar said.
The MPs from Chhattisgarh had been demanding a better support price from the Centre for the past few years while the latter had increased the support price on paddy by barely Rs 60 per quintal, he said.
‘If the farmers do not get a fair price for their produce, would they repeat the same crop in the next seasonIJ If that happens, the situation would create a serious food supply chain problem in the country,’ Dhankad said.
To a query on the steps being taken by the BJP’s Kisan Morcha to prevent rampant cases of agricultural land acquisition by the real estate developers across the country, he commented : ‘The Kisan Morcha would be demanding inclusion of certain provisions in the proposed land Acquisition Bill which would protect the farmers from their land being acquired by the real estate developers’.
‘The current scenario is the country is that a farmer selling land to a real estate developer is happy with the cash received for the first three years and thereafter, he returns as agricultural labourer to the field,’ Dhankar said.
He said that the land Acquisition Bill needs to be Pro-farmer. ‘The land prices in the country are going up while the agricultural yields are falling with the land resources getting shifted to the rich’.
There needs to be a provision in the land Acquisition Bill, that, if the land sold by him is not developed by the developer within five years, the land must be returned back to the farmer, he said. The farmers today are struggling with a high input cost and high price of seeds which are supplied by the MNCs.They (the farmers are neither getting any price advantage on sale of farm produce nor the input cost of farming is coming down, Dhankar said.