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Cash, not grains for two social safety projects

Star Business Report
The government is set to introduce cash payments for Food for Work and Test Relief programmes instead of providing rice and wheat.
The decision came at a meeting yesterday of the food planning and monitoring committee, said Food Minister Quamrul Islam.
The shift in payment to cash comes as the previous system of providing rice and wheat led to waste, said a food ministry official. Besides, the food grains could not be delivered to the project areas on time, he added.
For the last several years, the payment for Food for Work programme and Test Relief was given partially in cash: the rice and wheat allocated for the programmes were sold to make payments in cash.
The meeting also decided that the programme to provide rice at Tk 10 per kg to the extreme poor will begin on September 7. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will inaugurate the programme in Kurigram district.
The government will sell rice at Tk 10 a
kilogram to 50 lakh poor households across the country, Islam said.
Rice would be distributed to the rural poor at union levels during the lean periods of September-November and March-April. The target group will get 30 kilograms of rice a month.
Some 7.5 lakh tonnes of rice would be needed for the programme, food ministry officials told the meeting.
The allocation would be managed by diverting the rice allocated to the Food for Work and Test Relief programmes. About 8.5 lakh tonnes of rice and wheat was needed for the Food for Work programme.
The food ministry has already prepared a policy for the distribution of rice.
All the extreme poor households in Bangladesh will be brought under the programme, meaning about 2 crore people stand to benefit from it.
Presently, 12.9 percent of the total population suffer from extreme poverty.
Coarse rice sells at Tk 34 to Tk 36 a kg at the retail level, meaning the poor will get a discount of Tk 24, according to the ministryreport.
Cash, not grains for two social safety projects
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Under the programme, women-led poor families — particularly those widowed, divorced or abandoned — will be given priority, said the guidelines.
The extreme poor families with children will be given preference as well. Those under the Vulnerable Croup Development programme of the government's social safety net scheme will not be included.
To select the beneficiaries, a five-member committee will be formed at the upazila level, with a government official at the level acting as head of the body.
The members of the committee will include the union parisad chairman and two noted persons of the union. An upazila level committee headed by the local lawmaker will scrutinise the list. For every 500 households there will be a dealer, and the dealers will sell the rice to the target group as per the list prepared by the committee.
The government introduced a similar project in February 2011 to distribute rice at lower than the market price to the grassroots poor. The scheme, which was called the fair price card'scheme, is currently dormant.