Union Budget 2013: Meagre raise for food security bill

NEW DELHI: It looks like the UPA is not banking too much upon the National Food Security Bill to shore up its political fortunes in the next general elections.
Finance minister P Chidambaram enhanced the subsidy for providing cheap rations to the poor by a mere Rs 5,000 crore over the Rs 85,000 crore revised estimates of last year even as he said, “The National Food Security Bill is a promise of the UPA government.I sincerely hope that Parliament will pass the bill as early as possible.”
The meagre increment indicated that despite Chidambaram’s special mention of the scheme, the government may not be looking at an expansive rollout of the legislation.
While the government maintained the long-standing cap on the number of beneficiaries under the public distribution system, it had to increase the subsidy budget by Rs 12,178 crore last year owing largely to the increase in procurement prices of paddy and wheat.
Even the conservative alternative of the food security bill (giving cheap rations to 67% of the population) is set to substantially increase the number of beneficiaries from the existing 6.52 crore under the PDS system.
Indicating the kind of budgetary support the bill would require, the parliamentary standing committee reviewing the bill had recently estimated that if the government was to consider the 2011 population and the proposed new cap on the number of beneficiaries, the subsidy bill even for 2012-13 would have risen to Rs 1,12,205 crore.
But the fiscal prudence mantra seems to have hit the government’s ambitious plan on increasing food storage capacity as well with Food Corporation of India getting only an additional Rs 17 crore to build new silos. Computerization of monitoring the PDS system got Rs 150 crore, a substantial jump over last year’s revised estimate of Rs 32.14 crore.
Union Budget 2013
Budget news 2013 ​
Economic Survey