Patna:
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today said he supported the proposed Food Security Bill and thanked the UPA government for incorporating various suggestions of the Bihar government in the ambitious reform.
However, Mr Kumar urged the Centre to make it clear in the final draft which will be tabled in Parliament that states will not have to share the financial burden of the proposed bill.
The senior Janata Dal (United) leader also requested the UPA government to once again rethink about the composition of the Food Securities Commission. He said it should be mandatory that minority and backward communities are represented in the proposed seven-member commission, but at least five of them should have a rural background so that it does not become "a centre of the urban elites."
Critics say the food bill is little more than an attempt to help Congress, reeling from corruption scandals, win a third successive term. But Mr Kumar dismissed speculations that the food bill would earn votes for the Congress in the 2014 elections as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) did for the party in the 2009 polls.
"The legislation is being brought by the Congress in the last year of UPA II ... It will not pay any political dividend to them (UPA) in the 2014 elections," he said.
The Congress is consulting its allies about the food bill, which is the brainchild of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. It promises wheat and rice at a fraction of the cost to some 81 crore people, expanding current handouts to roughly 31.8 crore of India's poorest.
The bill will give rice at Rs. 3 per kg to the poorest people, less than 10 per cent of current retail prices, and wheat at Rs. 2 per kg.
The government has already budgeted Rs. 90,000 crore for the scheme in the current fiscal year ending March 2014. If the bill is passed, it will need to come up with as much as Rs. 1.3 lakh crore in 2014, adding to a total subsidy burden that already eats up about 2.4 per cent of gross domestic product.