OUR best hope for containing inflation and topping last year’s GDP growth rate is pinned on managing well the good cereal harvests we reaped in the outgoing financial year. Sizable food crops by themselves are no guarantee for their steady availability at the market-place, stabilisation of i grain prices and assured remunerative pfiyes to the 1 farmers. On the contrary, if the foodsttiffs arc not stored and preserved well, a lot of these would go waste reducing the level of supply thereby pushing the prices up as well. We now face such a predicament. one time too many, in actual fact, because when Aus was harvested stockpiles of Aman from the previous season at the godowns left little space for the former. The news is that there has been a long hold-up in the Irri-Boro procurement drive launched on paper a month and a half back solely because of dearth of space in the government godowns. The silos are brimming with previous stocks not to admit of anv fresh intake so that the targeted procurement of four lakh tonnes of Irri-Boro crop this year stands hindered. As a result, there could be price depression with the farmers being deprived of fair price from the most important cash crop that Irri-Boro is.

We would like to recommend a three-pronged strategy to the government as a reasonably comprehensive solution to the problem of gluts. In the I first place, the Public Food Distribution System (PFDS) needs streamlining with food offtakes for | development purpose falling in a steady pattern so that government silos have some space to accommodate new food arrivals. Secondly, the successive good harvests have shown the extent to where we need to enhance the storage capacity. The capacitybuilding should begin in earnest now. Finally, let the banks finance silo-building in the private sector with a provision for the government to hire some extra space there in case of acute need.