Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar today said it will be difficult to implement the proposed Food Security Act with existing distribution system and suggested massive reforms.

“I will be failing in my duty if I do not emphasise the fact that the Food Security Act will never succeed in achieving its goal in letter and spirit, if we try to push the same through the existing PDS apparatus,” Mr. Pawar said at a conference here.

New Delhi Officials of the food, agriculture and finance ministries will meet the state and central ministers concerned in a bid to thrash out objections raised by the states over the proposed Food

New Delhi The 2012-13 Budget may not have to provide as big a jump in the food subsidy bill as expected earlier.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday urged states and Union territories to hasten reforms in the public distribution system (PDS) for the effective implementation of the Food Security Bill.

Inaugurating a two-day conference of chief secretaries of states and Union territories, the prime minister said, “I would urge you to pay urgent attention to end-to-end computerisation of the PDS. We should be in a position to effectively implement the Food Security Bill by the time it becomes an Act of Parliament.”

In order to plug the pilferage of food items meant for distribution to people below the poverty line, the Supreme Court on Friday directed the Union food secretary to hasten the process of computerisation of entire PDS system.

A bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Dipak Misra set a deadline of two months to put in place the computerisation process for the PDS in entire country while asking the food secretary to take up the matter with each state and then submit a report.

This budget publication, viz. “Socio-Economic Review, Gujarat State, 2011-12” has been prepared by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, for presentation in the Budget Session of the State Assembly.

The Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Assam has been publishing this annual report “Economic Survey, Assam” regularly with a view to focus the trends of performance based development of the State economy.

The NSS consumer expenditure survey (CES) aims at generating estimates of average household monthly per capita consumer expenditure (MPCE), its distribution over households and persons, and its break-up by commodity group, at national and State/UT level, and for different socio-economic groups.

This new report contains valuable data on consumption levels and pattern of households in Delhi. It also provides information on the main demographic features like literacy, social-group, marital status, occupational distribution, and other aspects of living conditions like, source of energy for cooking/lighting, dwelling ownership type, etc.

The National Food Security Bill is based on Sarvodaya principles as it has adopted a human life cycle approach, looks at providing coarse grains (nutri-cereals) at subsidised rates, giving impetus

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