BHUBANESWAR: Even as the Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare (FS&CW) department has gone for market intervention in a limited way to moderate onion price volatility, non-utilisation of fund meant for price stabilisation has defeated the purpose of creating a special corpus fund.
The State Government has created a corpus of Rs 100 crore under the Price Stabilisation Fund (PSF) to help regulate the price volatility of important agri-horticultural commodities like onion, potato and pulses.
As the onion prices in the retail market across the State have become prohibitive for the common consumers and prices of potato are steadily increasing, the Government needs to leverage the corpus fund to provide cushion to the consumers through market intervention.
The State has received financial assistance of Rs 25 crore from the Centre under the PSF for the current financial year. In order to avail further advance from the Central corpus fund, the Government had to submit its project proposals to the Price Stabilization Fund Management Committee (PSFMC) of the Centre.
“Around Rs 75 crore is available in the PSF managed by the FS&CW department, the nodal department for the scheme. But the Government has no plan to utilise the fund,” official sources said.
The department had announced to use the fund to procure onion from the buffer stock of the Centre through the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation (NAFED) to undertake market intervention operations in September when the prices of edible bulb increased to Rs 50 a kg.
The Government did not bother to make a formal request to the Centre for supply of onion despite the latter asking States facing shortage of the commodity to source the same from the buffer stock.
Set up in 2014-15, the objective of the PSF scheme is to maintain a strategic buffer of the three essential commodities for subsequent calibrated release to moderate price volatility and discourage hoarding and unscrupulous speculation.
For building such stock, the scheme promotes direct purchase from farmers and Regulated Market Committees (RMCs). The PSF is utilised for granting interest-free advance of working capital to State agencies to undertake market intervention operations.
At present, the department is utilising contingency fund available in the district to sell onion through fair price shops at ‘no profit no loss basis’.
In the State Capital having more than 10 lakh population, only four Maitree (fair price) shops are selling limited stocks of onion at Rs 50 a kg to the consumers. The four outlets are located at Indradhanu Market, Unit-IV, Saheed Nagar and Baramunda.