Minister for Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution department, Chowdhary Zulfkar Ali today said that Jammu and Kashmir will stop procurement of foodgrains from the FCI in case the latter did not improve the quality of the food items.
The minister said the state will procure the food grains directly from the Mandies of Punjab.
The minister was speaking at a meeting with Food and Civil Supplies Minister in the Punjab Government Adesh Pratap Singh Kairon here today.
Zulfkar sought the help of Punjab minister in this regard “so that people of the Jammu and Kashmir get quality food grains.”
Zulfkar also discussed modalities of procuring food grains directly from the Punjab market (Mandies) instead of Food Corporation of India.
The minister said that he is not going to compromise on the quality of food grains and he had earlier conveyed his dissatisfaction over the low quality of food grains supplied by Food Corporation of India to Jammu & Kashmir.
He said he will not allow substandard food grains for his people as the issue is directly linked with the health of human being and he cannot compromise on the issue of human health.
He said that he want supply of standard quality of rice, wheat and sugar for the state of Jammu and Kashmir and even after repeated communications to FCI, nothing was improved on ground.
The minister discussed various issues relating to supply of quality food grains, National Food Security Act and digitalization of data with Kairon.
The meeting was held in the office chamber of Food and Civil Supplies Minister of Punjab.
In the meeting, Implementation of NFSA in J&K, exclusion, inclusion criteria, implication of enactment were discussed in detail.
The issue relating to making the entire food chain management in the state fully digitized was also discussed.
During deliberations, issue of minimizing pilferages in the state and providing of packed food grains for a period of six months to the consumers at one time in the remote areas and snow bound areas were discussed in detail.
