Top Highlights

• The subsidised prices are specified in Schedule-1 of the NFSA, which the government can change by executive order. Until the end of 2022, NFSA beneficiaries paid Rs 3, Rs 2, and Re 1 per kg of rice, wheat, and nutri-cereals (millets) respectively. These prices were not changed for years, even though the economic cost of foodgrains and the food subs...
• The NFSA was enacted by the UPA-2 government, and came into effect on July 5, 2013. The law guaranteed “access to adequate quantity of quality food at affordable prices” under the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) to 50% of the urban and 75% of the rural population of the country. The overall national coverage of the NFSA is about 67.5% of...
• The latest published Census figures are from 2011 — and based on that, about 81.35 crore people can be covered by the NFSA.
• The economic cost of foodgrains has four main components — pooled cost of grain, procurement incidentals, acquisition cost, and distribution cost. All of these have increased over the years.
• The government’s food subsidy bill too, has increased apace. It peaked at Rs 5,41,330.14 crore in 2020-21 before falling to Rs 2,86,469.11 crore in 2021-22. For 2022-23, the government budgeted a subsidy bill of Rs 2,06,831.09 crore, and said that the cost of distributing free foodgrains under the NFSA would be around Rs 2 lakh crore.

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