Assam is Focusing on Reducing Food Prices to Check Inflation

Mumbai, Feb 12 : Addressing the chief ministers' conference held in Delhi recently Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi said that food inflation had become a matter of concern for all states and that needed to be tackled with all measures to alleviate the impact on the common man.

In order to minimize the difference between the wholesale and retail prices and to prevent unscrupulous elements, continuous endeavors from the state government's side is on. The conference was held at Vigyan Bhavan under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. Gogoi informed that Assam government had taken initiatives for producing more vegetables under the rabi crops category like potatoes, onions, mustard, peas, lentils, black grams, arahar and other vegetable crops under a " Special scheme of grow more vegetable."

Steps had also been taken to set up a State Civil Supplies Corporation for direct market intervention to keep the prices of essential commodities under control. In addition a cold storage of 84450 tones capacity had been created in the first phase recently to facilitate the farmers, he added.

According to the information provided by Gogoi, there are about 20 lakh domestic LPG connections in the state out of which 11.37 lakh are single connections and the balance 8.70 are double cylinder connections.

He urged upon the ministry of petroleum to convert all single connections to double to ease the scarcity position that results in long queues in front of LPG distributors. He also drew attention of the agriculture minister to provide mustard oil at subsidized rate through PDS network instead of palm oil which is not preferred by consumers in the state.