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Money-starved food processing ministry may wind up, fears panel

The ministry of food processing is in danger of getting wound up because of declining financial allocation and faulty programming of schemes, Parliament's standing committee on agriculture has warned.

In its eleventh report, the committee has noted the ministry's effective performance has been crippled mainly by gradual reduction in the plan allocation which is a mere Rs 2.5 billion for the Ninth Plan period. The budget estimate of the ministry for 1998-99 is only Rs 488.2 million, including the non-plan allocation of Rs 47.2 million.

The plan allocation has been declining very dangerously from 0.091 per cent in 1992-93 to 0.041 per cent for 1998-99, the committee noted.

An allocation of Rs 2 billion per year would be the barest minimum requirement for the ministry to survive.

The committee urged the Planning Commission and the finance ministry to take measures accordingly. This will help farmers, the common masses, the food processing sector and the nation, it said.

It advocated that the allocation for the ministry should not, in any case, be less than 0.2 per cent of the total Budget.

The limited number of schemes the ministry was undertaking also came in for criticism. The committee had earlier proposed that the ministry should come up with an effective package of varied programmes that could be implemented on a much larger scale. This could have led to receiving an allocation of at least Rs 20 billion for the Ninth Plan. But the ministry did not do much in this direction, it noted.

The committee also criticised the shifting of fisheries department to the ministry of agriculture and livestock products processing to the department of animal husbandry, which further erodes the significance of the food processing ministry.

The committee was also critical of the way the Planning Commission forced clubbing of the schemes belonging to unrelated subjects to justify the slashing of plan funds. The 48 schemes proposed by the ministry for the Ninth Plan funding was reduced to 26.

In the fisheries sector for example, the ministry has only the responsibility for drying of fish and refrigeration and utilisation of trash fish. While pursuing the schemes, it has failed to take note of the range of commercial technology developed by the agriculture ministry's integrated fisheries project and the Central Institute of Fishery Technology.

The inaction of the ministry in promoting backward linkage for maize and coarse grains processing also came in for criticism. Although Rs 9.5 million was allocated for this scheme in 1997-98, not even one paise was found to have been spent on this count.

UNI