Hyderabad, September 20: The FCI warehouse at Jangalapalle in Anantapur is an old one, having been built in 1984. It has a storage capacity of 75,000 MT. A railway track runs alongside, making transportation easier to and from the warehouse. Rice and wheat from different parts of the country are stored here and released to the PDS.
A quick look around, and you see wheat, some 27,000 tonnes of it, stocked out in the open, left to the mercy of nature. The only precaution taken is that the wheat bags are covered with tarpaulin sheets. The stock was imported from Firozepur and Bhatinda in Punjab last year for distribution to the PDS but it never moved. It has been left to rot.
Rice gets pride of place in the FCI godowns in the south. Here, a whopping 1.04 lakh tonnes of rice is stored inside the godown, nudging the wheat out.
Every month, nearly 20,000 tonnes of rice is supplied to the PDS. However, no wheat has been issued from this warehouse for a long time. As a result, the stock is slowly rotting.
FCI district manager Joseph says all precautions have been taken to protect the foodgrains. Pesticides and rodenticides aluminium phosphate, Navon, Deltamelthrin and others have been sprayed in the godown.
Railway wagons bearing foodgrains arrive at the warehouse at 8 pm everyday but have to wait till the next morning to be offloaded. As a result, FCI shells out several lakhs of rupees to the railways as demurrage. This is due to the nonavailability of labourers to shift the stock to the warehouse, which is 10 km away from town.
In the past, theft of foodgrain from these godowns was a common occurrence as there is poor security after 6 pm. But recently with police implementing strict measures, thefts have come down drastically.
Joseph says the transport bottlenecks are indeed a problem and contributes no less to the inventory pileup.
–Agencies