Food Corporation Of India Research Articles

Implementation, delivery, and utilization of iron fortified rice supplied through public distribution system across different states in India: An exploratory mixed-method study.

Food fortification with micronutrients is one of the cost-effective and sustainable methods to prevent micronutrient deficiencies at community level. The rice fortified with iron, folic acid, and vitamin B12 is being supplied through various social welfare schemes in India in a phased manner and planned to cover the entire country by March 2024. We have conducted a situational analysis to assess the rollout of fortified rice supplied through the Public Distribution System (PDS) and to evaluate the accessibility, availability, acceptability, and utilization of fortified rice by the beneficiaries of the PDS. This was a mixed-method, sequential exploratory study conducted in six districts from six different states of India that had begun distribution of fortified rice through PDS in pilot mode during 2020-2021. In each district, the district supply officer of the PDS, Food Corporation of India (FCI) or State Food Corporation (SFC) warehouse supervisor, and four Fair Price Shop (FPS) dealers were interviewed. Under each FPS, a minimum of seven beneficiary households were randomly selected and interviewed using a structured questionnaire. The in-depth interviews were conducted with different stakeholders using theme guides. All the interviewed stakeholders were aware about their roles and responsibilities and purpose to distribute fortified rice. There was a continuous supply of fortified rice (across all visited districts) to beneficiaries through a well-established system. Acceptability and compliance to intake of fortified rice was good with no reported gastrointestinal adverse outcomes following fortified rice intake. There was an efficient roll-out of fortified rice though PDS with a good compliance to intake of fortified rice. It is feasible to design and conduct a study to assess the impact of fortified rice on anemia and iron storage at the community level.

Smart food grain storage system using Internet of Things (IoT): A Review

India is one of the largest producers of food grains in the world. The country has a diverse agricultural sector that produces a wide range of crops, including rice, wheat, maize, pulses (such as lentils and chickpeas), and oilseeds. Rice and wheat are considered essential for ensuring food security in India. India has an extensive network of food grain storage infrastructure to cater to its significant agricultural production. The storage infrastructure in India is primarily managed by the Food Corporation of India (FCI), state government agencies, and private sector entities. Some of food grain storage infrastructure in India are warehouses, covered storage structures (silos), mandi storage facilities (temporarily store grains) and strategic reserve (buffer stock for food security). Private sector entities are increasingly investing in the modern storage facilities including temperature-controlled warehouses and automated storage systems, to improve storage capacity and reduce post-harvest losses. India faces challenges in effectively managing and maintaining the quality of stored food grains. Issues such as inadequate storage capacity, insufficient maintenance, lack of proper pest control measures, and logistical constraints contribute to post-harvest losses. The government and other stakeholders are continuously working on improving storage infrastructure and implementing technological solutions to address these challenges that tiggers for spoilage, mold growth, insect infestation and excessive drying. The real time monitoring and controlling of these factor during the storage period is a cumbersome task and needs advanced techniques. In this aspect Internet of Things (IoT) offers numerous benefits to food grain storage systems including real-time monitoring, early warning systems, optimal environmental conditioning, energy efficiency, inventory management, traceability and predictive analytics. By leveraging IoT technology, the industry can improve storage practices, reduce losses, ensure food safety, and enhance the overall efficiency of grain storage operations.

Food Corporation of India: Making Public Procurement More Inclusive and Efficient

This case concerns the issue of enhancing the inclusivity and efficiency of public procurement operations undertaken by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) in Uttar Pradesh. The FCI was the premier central government agency entrusted with efficient management of minimum support price (MSP)-based public procurement operations, maintenance of buffer stocks for ensuring food security and assisting states in operating their public distribution systems. The Uttar Pradesh region came under the north zone of the FCI. Mr Girish Kumar, General Manager of Uttar Pradesh region of the FCI, was exploring ways to make procurement operations inclusive and efficient. Girish received feedback from a brainstorming session of the procurement team in which recommendations of a recently conducted concurrent evaluation study of public procurement in Uttar Pradesh were discussed. He wanted to amalgamate his domain knowledge with insights from the concurrent evaluation study for an actionable plan to design a more inclusive and efficient MSP-based public procurement system.

Institutional Arrangements to Enforce the Minimum Support Price (MSP) Policy Effectively in India: A Case Study of Wheat and Paddy Production in Punjab

The paper tries to examine the institutional arrangements to enforce the minimum support price (MSP) in India with a special reference to a highly agricultural-producing state, which is also known as the food bowl of India. The current study is based on the Punjab state which is an agriculturally rich state, here, paddy and wheat farmers suffered low losses as compared to other crop cultivators, but they are not separate from losses. These institutional arrangements to enforce the MSP policy examined by studying cost of Production, FHP, MSP, and crop procurement by the government agencies and their benefited farmers of wheat and paddy. The study calculated the percent change in over the period of 2012-13 to 2020-21 of costs data from the Directorate of Economics & Statistics (DES), and this study analysed the procurement data published by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India. The percentage analysis is used as a statistical tool for this research, to access the effectiveness of MSP by its institutional arrangements that enforce the MSP effectively. The institutional arrangements to enforcement the MSP of wheat and paddy is found to be effective in Punjab. The MSP seeks to guarantee fair prices for the growers that promote greater investment and output of the produce. The result of the paper revealed that within the time being the cost of production, cost of cultivation, FHP, MSP, and government procurement of wheat and paddy is increasing, whereas the number of benefited farmers has not significantly increased. The findings of this research unravel that wheat and paddy growers of Punjab are getting supported largely due to effective procurement by the government at the MSP. Overall, at the state of Punjab the procurement of wheat and paddy by the government agencies such as FCI and state agencies is satisfactory, and conclude that the institutional arrangements for wheat and paddy procurement at MSP in Punjab is effective in nature.

Is Minimum Support Price Effective in India? Evidence from State-wise Paddy Procurement

Aims: The paper tries to examine the effectiveness of the minimum support price (MSP) policy based on empirical data on price deviations as well as the procurement of paddy crops by various agencies. The cost and gross margin of cultivation are also analysed to add further reliability to the overall assessment of MSP policy.
 Data and Methodology: The effectiveness of price policy is examined by studying farm harvest price (FHP) with respect to MSP of Paddy. We have calculated the deviations of FHP of paddy from MSP for the entire study period of 1996-2016, where the positive deviations are taken as an indicator of the effectiveness of price policy. Our study has analysed the procurement data published by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers welfare. We also used the unit-level data from the ‘Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households’, 2012-13 of NSSO.
 Results: The MSP policy is found to be effective in Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, and Punjab but ineffective in other major rice-producing states across the country. And in states like Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu, a vast majority of the medium, semi-medium, and small farmers sell their paddy to private agencies, thus making MSP policy for paddy in those states a complete failure. In states such as Haryana and Maharashtra, large farmers are found selling a significant portion of their total marketed surplus to processors.
 Conclusion: Overall, at the national level, procurement by government agencies (which stands at 17.2 percent) is far from satisfactory. The policy implication calls for enhancing paddy procurement by government agencies across the farming groups rather than concentrating only on medium and large farmers.

Wheat Procurement Forecasting for Indian PDS Using Regression Model

In this paper the regression model is developed to forecast the wheat procurement for PDS in India. The FCI(Food Corporation of India) procure various food grain to ensure food security to all Indians. Indian PDS(Public Distribution System) is one of the largest supply chain which covers more than 800 million beneficiaries and have FPS(Fair price Shops) across the country. In this paper we computed the errors and Theil’s U coefficient for the proposed method to show its efficacy and the results turned out to be acceptable.

Safe grain storage- post harvest technology: an Indian perspective

Due to green revolution and technological advancement in crop production, India has attained sufficiency in food grain productivity, yet a large population in our country goes hungry. The major reason for this is the postharvest losses that occur during storage, procurement and distribution. Factors such as improper and inadequate storage facilities, climatic conditions, ineffective management policies lead to physical, chemical and biological deterioration of food grains. Abiotic factors such as grain moisture content, temperature, initial grain condition and aeration system are crucial considerations for safe storage. Biological deterioration and losses due to fungi, mites, insects, birds and rodents are also significant. In India, Food Corporation of India (FCI) is the nodal agency, under the Ministry of consumer affairs, responsible for procurement of food grains at minimum support price (MSP), movement of produce to deficit regions, public distribution system (PDS) and maintenance of buffer stocks. Government of India constituted a high-level Shanta Kumar Committee in 2014 to recommend ways to rationalize and minimize postharvest losses, in addition to the already existing government policies. Futuristic approach to prevent these losses are to have bold and proactive reforms in India's grain management systems by implementing the recommendations of the Committee, using appropriate storage protocols, continuing subsidy only to the poor under Antyodaya Anna Yojna (AAY), controlling the subsidized grain distribution under NFSA (National Food Security Act-2013), intervention of private sectors and liquidation of stocks to contain inflation.

Multi-echelon agri-food supply chain network design integrating operational and strategic objectives: a case of public distribution system in India.

The global concern to ensure the availability of food for the growing world’s population draws urgent attention towards the inefficiencies in agri-food supply chains. Agri-food supply chains are inherently complex to manage than other supply chains mainly because of their multi-echelon structure, deteriorating product quality with time and changes in storage conditions which leads to significant amount of food loss and wastage. Additionally, any natural or man-made disaster further disrupts the chain and leads to high food loss, high supply chain costs, reduced food availability and poor food quality. Hence, there is a need to design resilient and efficient agri-food supply chain network for optimal multi-echelon storage and distribution to reduce food loss and quality degradation. For this purpose, a Fuzzy Multi Objective Linear Program (FMOLP) is proposed in this paper for integrated food procurement, storage and distribution under cost, resilience and quality considerations. The proposed model integrates the short-term operational objective of cost optimization with the long-term sustainable objectives of food loss minimization and resilience maximization. The proposed FMOLP is illustrated using a realistic case of Public Distribution System using the data benchmarked with the numbers reported by the Food corporation of India. The detailed computational analysis carried out in the paper in investigates three categories of problem sizes to compare and contrast the decisions using different strategies and to provide organizational, operational and policy insights on the trade-off between cost, food loss and resilience.

Warehouse Storage Management of Wheat and Their Role in Food Security

Silo storage is considered the best option for wheat storage. However, the storage losses in warehouse storage are also equivalent to silo storage of wheat when proper storage management practices are adopted and the Food Corporation of India (FCI) is the best example of a sustainable food storage system with only 0.3% storage losses in 3 years of wheat storage. The wheat procurement, storage, and distribution system of FCI is unique in the world and handles about 85 million tons of food grains annually by procuring from farmers at the guaranteed Minimum Support Price that meets certain quality standards. This article discusses the role of FCI in food security, warehouse storage management practice as a model, and storage loss level of wheat during storage.

Blockchain in Indian Public Distribution System: a conceptual framework to prevent leakage of the supplies and its enablers and disablers

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for the application of blockchain in the Public Distribution System (PDS) in India to manage the supply of food grains to the targeted beneficiaries. The framework will help prevent diversions and leakages of grains at the warehouse and Fair Price Shop (FPS) level. The paper also identifies the enablers and disablers in the context of the framework. Design/methodology/approach This paper will firstly review the previous literature in PDS and blockchain-enabled agricultural and food supply chains. The study then proposes a framework that could be implemented in the PDS in India using blockchain technology. Findings The proposed framework provides an effective way to combat corruption, exclusion errors of targeted beneficiaries, leakage of PDS food grains and is cost-effective. The identified enablers and disablers give an insight into the application of blockchain in PDS in India. Research limitations/implications The research work may have implications for the Ministry of Food and PDS (Central Government), Food Corporation of India and State Governments to manage the supply of the grains more efficiently and effectively. Originality/value The current study caters to the implementation of blockchain technology starting from the warehouse level to the FPSs and consumers and simultaneously connecting them to concerned authorities to ensure transparency and accountability.

Punjab’s ecological crisis: The Akali Dal, SGPC, and competing democratic and authoritarian approaches to development

ABSTRACT When the 'green revolution' began in Punjab in 1964, Punjab sprang to the front rank of Indian agricultural production. But since about 2000, it has been increasingly clear that the technology is leading to an encompassing ecological disaster. The reason for the change lies in the organizational framework. Born in a spirit of flexible egalitarian democracy, it is now dominated by rigid central authoritarianism that forces farmers to grow one crop rotation for one buyer: wheat and rice for the Food Corporation of India. The SGPC and Akali Dal have had an important role in this transformation. This describes it.

Development of simple, rapid and accurate method for identification of head rice and brokens using image processing

The quality analysis of rice is done regularly during storage period at Food Corporation of India (FCI) and other godowns. This quality evaluation is done manually by trained person. This process is tedious and reliable results dependent on the skill of the person. Machine vision is an emerging technology for rapid identification of grain quality. It provides alternative for an automated, non-destructive and cost-effective technique. Therefore, present study was undertaken to develop and validate a simple, rapid and accurate method for identification of head rice and brokens of three varieties i.e. Punjab Pusa Basmati 1509, PR121 and PR124 using digital image processing method. The images of randomly selected 40 grains each of head rice and brokens for each variety were captured through flatbed scanner followed by processing of images using open source Image J software. The values of various morphological parameters (viz. length, width, thickness, sphericity, geometric mean diameter and volume) of sample grain extracted were compared by the values calculated using digital vernier caliper. Statistical analysis showed that the results obtained by digital vernier caliper can be linearly correlated to the results obtained by image processing. For varieties Punjab Pusa Basmati 1509, PR121 and PR124, variation in manually calculated length and predicted length was 98.5%, 98.3% and 93.8% and the variation in manually calculated width and predicted width was 97.6%, 96.9% and 97.9%. All the results were found significant at 5% level of significance (p

Losses in stored wheat in Punjab

Despite improved yield in the field, wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) at storage is heavily attacked by numerous pests. The loss assessment studies carried on wheat in 2014 and 2015 revealed that household storage practice suffered highest grain damage and weight loss due to storage pests. Healthy grains were highest in treated samples over untreated control samples at all storage locations. Highest pest incidence was observed in treated household samples over PAU and Moga outdoor storage, whereas there was no incidence found in Moga indoor storage. The population build up of Rhyzopertha dominica was highest in untreated control followed by T. castaneum, S. oryzae and C. cephalonica. Among various storage protection strategies used at storage levels, Moga (outdoor) storage registered a highest use of aluminium phosphide as fumigation practice followed by Rampuraphul (indoor), household storage, Moga (indoor) and PAU practice. At the end of investigation period, farmers and Food Corporation of India (FCI) were advised to follow PAU practice.

Modelling of sustainable food grain supply chain distribution system: a bi-objective approach

Growing food demand, environmental degradation, post-harvest losses and the dearth of resources encourage the decision makers from developing nations to integrate the economic and environmental aspects in food supply chain network design. This paper aims to develop a bi-objective decision support model for sustainable food grain supply chain considering an entire network of procurement centres, central, state and district level warehouses, and fair price shops. The model seeks to minimise the cost and carbon dioxide emission simultaneously. The model covers several problem peculiarities such as multi-echelon, multi-period, multi-modal transportation, multiple sourcing and distribution, emission caused due to various motives, heterogeneous capacitated vehicles and limited availability, and capacitated warehouses. Multiple realistic problem instances are solved using the two Pareto based multi-objective algorithms. Sensitivity analysis results imply that the decision makers should establish a sufficient number of warehouses in each producing and consuming states by maintaining the suitable balance between the two objectives. Various policymakers like Food Corporation of India, logistics providers and state government agencies will be benefited from this research study.

Development of sensitive polyclonal antibodies against dominant stored wheat grain fungus for its immunological detection

Fungal infestation causes deterioration of stored food grains. Most fungal species produce secondary metabolites like aflatoxins which are highly toxic to animals and humans. Aspergillus flavus has been found to be the predominant contaminant in stored wheat grains collected from the godowns of Food Corporation of India, West Bengal. The present study focuses on the development of sensitive polyclonal antibodies (PAbs) for molecular immunological detection of dominant toxigenic fungus. Pure A. flavus isolate was cultured on coconut agar media and its spores were harvested and inactivated by 4% formaldehyde. The inactivated spores were injected into a rabbit along with Freund’s complete/incomplete adjuvant for the development of PAbs. Specificity of the raised antibodies in rabbit serum was examined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) using spore proteins as antigen obtained by bead beating method. Out of several proteins (ranging from 10 to 200 kDa present in spore, only two prominent proteins of around 76 kDa and 100 kDa were detected by western blot analysis using raised polyclonal antiserum. The PAbs were purified with protein A column followed by spore proteins conjugated CNBr activated sepharose column for its use in the detection of fungal antigens. This highly purified raised antibody can be used for the development of rapid, sensitive, and accurate techniques (such as dot blot/ELISA) for the detection of toxigenic fungi present in stored wheat grains.

A mathematical model and solution methods for rail freight transportation planning in an Indian food grain supply chain

This paper addresses the rail transportation of food grains undertaken by Food Corporation of India (FCI) to meet the requirements of the food security programme called Public Distribution System (PDS). The research focuses on improving the allocation of railway rakes transporting food grains to a set of storage warehouses. A penalty factor based approach is adopted to represent the considerations in transportation planning and three penalty factors such as rake penalty factor, weekly penalty factor and capacity utilization penalty factor are introduced for the purpose. The single source - multiple destination problem is formulated and solved using exact method to minimize the sum of these three penalty factor values, termed total penalty. Further, a heuristic named optimum rake allocation algorithm is developed and tested using a set of 35 problem instances. The proposed heuristic is found to be highly efficient in terms of solution quality and computation time. A case study of FCI Kerala Region is also carried out to validate the formulated model and the proposed heuristic. The work provides valuable insights into the practical issues encountered in rail freight transportation planning and proposes an effective solution methodology to address them.

Farmers, Procurement and Agripreneurship in India

India is facing a major crisis in the agriculture sector on various fronts, be it infrastructure building or procurement of food grains. The Food Corporation of India (FCI) has been following the conventions laid down by the National Commission on Farmers (NCF), 2004 but there are certain systemic problems still. A more fundamental reform of the system is needed and I posit that a public-private partnership model, which has an element of agripreneurship in it, would help India not only in sustainable agricultural practices but also in poverty alleviation, as it has in Africa.

Broken wheat: A byproduct of the milling industry towards nutrition security

India at present finds itself in the midst of a paradoxical situation: endemic mass-hunger coexisting with the mounting food grain stocks. The food grain stocks available with the Food Corporation of India (FCI) stand at an all time high of 62 million tonnes against an annual requirement of around 20 million tonnes for ensuring food security. Still, an estimated 200 million people are underfed and 50 million on the brink of starvation, resulting in starvation deaths. The paradox lies in the inherent flaws in the existing policy and implementation bottlenecks. India's food security policy has a laudable objective to ensure availability of food grains to the common people at an affordable price and it has enabled the poor to have access to food where none existed. The policy has focused essentially on growth in agriculture production (once India used to import food grains) and on support price for procurement and maintenance of rice and wheat stocks. The responsibility for procuring and stocking of food grains lies with the FCI and for distribution with the public distribution system (PDS).

Managing welfare driven supply chains: insights from the Indian PDS

The objectives of this paper are to understand the design, implementation and monitoring of welfare driven food supply chains. As a case in point the Indian public distribution system (PDS) has been investigated. In India a targeted public distribution system (TPDS) was carved out as a novel system of safety net operations for the distribution of scheduled commodities to the targeted citizens. The distribution of commodities is through a network of institutions comprising Food Corporation of India (FCI) warehouses and fair price shops (FPS). The methodology adopted is a mix of literature review, document analysis, interview with policy makers, officials responsible for distribution of food grains, fair price shop owners and survey of end users. It is inferred that this system is fraught with inefficiency at all stages of the supply chain and service delivery is poor. A hybrid approach is proposed to retain the current PDS supply chain while making suitable process redesigns, introducing ICT-based interventions and involvement of private actors in the service delivery.

An MINLP model to support the movement and storage decisions of the Indian food grain supply chain

This paper addresses the novel three stage food grain distribution problem of Public Distribution System (PDS) in India which comprises of farmers, procurement centers, base silos and field silos. The Indian food grain supply chain consists of various activities such as procurement, storage, transportation and distribution of food grain. In order to curb transportation and storage losses of food grain, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) is moving towards the modernized bulk food grain supply chain system. This paper develops a Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) model for planning the movement and storage of food grain from surplus states to deficit states considering the seasonal procurement, silo capacity, demand satisfaction and vehicle capacity constraints. The objective function of the model seeks to minimize the bulk food grain transportation, inventory holding, and operational cost. Therein, shipment cost contains the fixed and variable cost, inventory holding and operational cost considered at the procurement centers and base silos. The developed mathematical model is computationally complex in nature due to nonlinearity, the presence of numerous binary and integer variables along with a huge number of constraints, thus, it is very difficult to solve it using exact methods. Therefore, recently developed, Hybrid Particle-Chemical Reaction Optimization (HP-CRO) algorithm has been employed to solve the MINLP model. Different problem instances with growing complexities are solved using HP-CRO and the results are compared with basic Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms. The results of computational experiments illustrate that the HP-CRO algorithm is competent enough to obtain the better quality solutions within reasonable computational time.