`4,600-crore pulse racket busted

The National Productivity Council (NPC), an autonomous government research agency under Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, has confirmed an expose by the Reporters Collective back in December 2021 that NAFED under the Agriculture Ministry rigged the auction of pulses of over Rs4,600 crore to benefit a few big millers. Even after the NPC findings and recommendation to immediately scrap the exchequer-unfriendly auction process where the millers bid for contracts to process raw pulses and deliver them to the states. However, after the Collective’s expose, NAFED stopped milling the pulses for welfare schemes and the Consumer Affairs Department decided in February to distribute only the raw pulses to the state to mill themselves.

The auction process replacing the conventional method helped the millers to rip the government of tonnes of pulses meant for the poor and the armed forces, lowering the guard against the millers supplying poor quality pulses. The NPC, a government agency, found how the Centre’s modified auction rules allowed the millers to corner the pulses and sell them at a profit in the open market.

The Reporters’ Collective, a collaborative reporting on the public interest issues, attributed the expose to reporters Shreegireesh Jalihal under the guidance of its editor Nitin Sethi. The full report is published in the web news channel of the Wire. NAFED was not short of warnings. The Comptroller and auditor general (CAG) of India had previously red-flagged similar bidding to the rice millers in Andhra that caused a loss of Rs1,195 crore to the exchequer. Instead, it scaled up the auction method to the national level in pulses and did not bother to prescribe any minimum to put the millers under check.