Departing from the usual norms of inventory management practised everywhere in the country, the department of Food and Civil Supplies is likely to rope in NCDEX E-Marketing limited for managing inventory for State Food Corporation (SFC) for food grains in transit from the godowns of Food Corporation of India and the stocks maintained by the SFC.
The first of its kind initiative in the country is likely to commence from the next financial year as the department of Food and Civil Supplies and officials of NEMl, a subsidiary of National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange, held preliminary round of discussion here on Saturday.
The department is exploring the viability of outsourcing warehouse management and hiring the company as ‘Managed Service Provider’ (MSP) for the state godowns. The NEMl was represented by Chief Executive Officer, Rakesh Prakash Sinha and Advisor to NCDEX, R Ramasheshan.
“Since our corporation is not well equipped and needs to be made more systematic, they have agreed to take up responsibility to a certain point so that inventory management improves,” said Food and Civil Supplies Minister Saryu Roy.
As an MSP, the NEMl would address the State’s need at a charge which officials claim would be within manageable limits and also do away with appointments of officials to manage around 200 warehouses of the State government. Notably, only 40-45 AGMs manage warehouses out of the total 250 godowns owned by the State Government.
“We have lots of vacancies in godowns and we have to often go for appointments or engage an MSP to run the show. They have assured that they will look into it if they can act as an MSP for our godown management. We will go for MSP instead of recruitment and will try that they run the system with the money that will be saved from stopping recruitment,” said Secretary of Food and Civil Supplies, Vinay Kumar Choubey.
Meanwhile, the department also held discussions with regard to hiring NEMl for paddy procurement system developed by the commodity management company and under the arrangement the company’s computerized monitoring platform will be used to track movement of paddy as the government is gearing up to lift the harvest at Minimum Support Price.
“We will take their help in the State’s share in paddy procurement. Their model is tested and we have to adopt it. Our objective is to ensure that farmers get the MSP they deserve and to see that FCI (Food Corporation of India) gets rice,” maintained Roy.
The monitoring system would switch into action from the point of procurement at PACS (Primary Agricultural Cooperative Societies), would track quantity transported to the mill and then report the quantity that would reach to the warehouses of Food Corporation of India.
The mobile-based information sharing would enable flow of information to farmers to apprise them about their produce to bring more transparency into disbursement of Minimum Support Price.
Notably, as the government begins paddy procurement in December, training on the NEMl’s platform for the officials would be complete in the first week of December. The company is also likely to get auction of sugar from the next financial year as it also helped the government in salt procurement.