OREANDA-NEWS.  To enable coordinated action to contain prices of essential food items, the Center has convened meeting of State Food Ministers on May 21st 2016 in New Delhi. The daylong meeting will be chaired by Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Sri Ram Vilas Paswan and will addressed by Union Agriculture Minister, Shri Radha Mohan Singh and Minister of State (I/C) for Commerce and Industry, Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman. Senior officials of various central ministries and departments including Consumer Affairs, Food, Agriculture, Commerce and Health & Family Welfare, Industry & Commerce will also participate in the meeting.

High on the agenda of the meeting will be discussion on measures required to check unreasonable increase in prices of some food items, especially, pulses, edible oils and sugar. An action plan in this regard will be discussed during the meeting which will include strengthening the price monitoring mechanism, coordinated strategy to check hoarding and to improve supply chain and use of Price Stabilization fund to ensure easy availability of these commodities.

Review of the implementation of the National Food Security Act, ensuring online allocation to all fair price shops,coverage of more ration shops with bio-metric devices and strengthening redressal system will also be deliberated upon during the meeting.

Besides this expediting “on line procurement” which include registering farmers details like mobile numbers, account numbers for sending messages and making direct payment to farmers through system generated cheques.

Agriculture sector reforms for marketing farmers produce will also be one of the agenda items for the meeting.