Allocation to the Price Stabilisation Fund (PSF) is likely to go up 80% in the upcoming budget, to protect consumers from price rises in essential food items.
The Government of India is likely to increase the allocation to the Price Stabilisation Fund (PSF) by 80% to Rs 900 crore in Budget 2016, in a bid to protect consumers from a price rise in essential food items.
The PSF, announced in the previous budget with a corpus of Rs 500 crore, was initially handled by the Agriculture Ministry. It uses funds to intervene in the market to boost the supply of onion and pulses to check price rise, and it was recently shifted to the Consumer Affairs Ministry, which will monitor it from April 1, 2016.
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"The plan allocation for the Consumer Affairs Ministry is expected to cross Rs 1,000 crore in the fiscal year 2016-17 with the shifting of PSF here. The allocation for PSF itself is likely to increase to Rs 900 crore from Rs 500 crore last year," a source said.
The PSF corpus would be used for conducting various programmes to protect consumers from price rise and other consumer welfare activities, a source added.
The fund would continue to be used this year for importing pulses as the output is expected to be lower at 17.33 million tonnes against the demand of 22-23 million tonnes. The state-owned MMTC has already floated two tur dal import tenders.
The fund will continue to be utilised for procurement of pulses for creating buffer stock, which will be offloaded in the market to control price rise. Already, more than 35,000 tonnes of pulses has been procured by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and other agencies from Kharif crop. The procurement of Rabi pulses will also begin shortly.
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