Hours after a media report that showed millions of metric tons of wheat grain rotting away in Punjab, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar promised on Thursday that his ministry would look for an urgent solution.
 
He has summoned the Punjab Food and Supplies Minister Adesh Partap Singh Kairon to Delhi to meet him. It is learnt that Kairon has rushed to the Capital.
 
Pawar's solution to food grain worth crores lying rotting in Punjab because of a lack of storage space, includes talking to the Punjab government about hiring an extra warehouse, if necessary.
 
An NDTV reporter found wheat worth 15 crores being eaten by insects because there just wasn't any place to store it. (Read and Watch: Food grain rots in Punjab as prices soar)
 
That shameful case of a government storage facility in Srihand in Punjab was not an isolated one. Across the state, at different government warehouses, wheat grain worth 500 to 800 crores is rotting away. In the last three years, 72 lakh metric tonnes of grain has been bought from farmers. Most of that is lying in the open because there's just not enough storage space.
 
 ''Unfortunately there has been no movement of these food grains going outside the state. There are no railway wagons available. And the Government of India is not sending this food out of Punjab,'' says Punjab's Finance Minister, Manpreet Badal.
 
Others try to defy what's obvious- a colossal and unaffordable waste. ''The shelf life of wheat stored in open is not more than one year. But what is lying here is two years old. This is the crop of 2008,'' says Dr Bhupinder Singh, Joint Director, Food & Civil Supplies, Punjab

Things will only get worse if that doesn't change. Punjab is heading for a bumper crop. The harvest begins next month. While the government figures out where to put it, consumers are dealing with food prices that pose a greater challenge every month for households all over the country.