January 13, 2010 Visionmp.com news service

Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has said that rising prices of essential commodities will start coming down in 8-10 days and that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called a meeting of the chief ministers in New Delhi on January 27 to discuss the issue, said reports.

“With the measures we have taken, the prices of essential commodities are expected to start coming down in eight to 10 days,” he was quoted as saying by IANS.

He made the statement while talking to reporters after a meeting of the cabinet committee on prices chaired by Manmohan Singh.

The minister said that prime minister would also take up the Essential Commodities Act for discussion with the chief ministers, the report said.

Pawar said that the wheat and rice stocks made available to states by the Centre were not being lifted by them.

“We have made sizeable allocations of wheat and rice to the states but sufficient ammounts have not been lifted,” he was quoted as saying.

The minister said that of the two million tonnes of wheat that had been allocated, only 159,000 tonnes had been lifted, while only 209,000 tonnes of the one million tonnes of rice that had been allocated had been lifted, the report said.

“After assessing the situation, the prime minister felt there should be a meeting with the chief ministers where he would appeal to them to lift the stocks that had been allocated,” Pawar said, adding that states had been told to take stern action against hoarders of food.

He said that government would take step to check smuggling of sugarcane and sugar from India to Nepal.

Announcing a major relaxation of norms for the import of raw sugar, he said that sugar could be refined anywhere in the country and not only by the mill that had imported it, report said.

Pawar said that the waiver had been granted as ‘a number of sugar mills in Uttar Pradesh had imported raw sugar for processing’. However, the bulk of the sugar is still lying in Kandla and Mundra ports in view of restrictions by the Uttar Pradesh government on the movement of raw sugar.