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Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh asserted that the Congress Government in Karnataka will not be shaken in its resolve to implement its guarantee. Therefore for the time being, it is launching a scheme today that will transfer Rs. 170 every month to each of the 4.42 crore persons in the state covered by ration cards, he said in a statement.
This transfer is equivalent to the amount the state government would have paid the Food Corporation of India (FCI) had the Modi Government not intervened at the last minute and stopped the sale of rice even though there are ample buffer stocks available, the Congress leader said. ”The cash transfer scheme launched today by the Congress Government in Karnataka is a befitting reply to the Modi Government’s vindictive policies in regard to food security for the poor especially in a state where the BJP was comprehensively rejected.
”These policies do not make for cooperative federalism that the PM likes to boast about. Instead they reflect confrontational federalism at its petty worst,” Ramesh said in the statement.
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”The Modi Government has played petty and vindictive politics on food security for the poor in Karnataka. It tried to sabotage the @INCKarnataka’s Anna Bhagya guarantee. But beginning today the state government has given a befitting reply even as it continues in its efforts to get additional rice,” he also Ramesh said after preventing the Karnataka government from going ahead with its purchase of rice from the FCI the Modi Government asked the FCI to e-auction rice to private traders with the condition that Karnataka could not buy from them.
But this e-auction has ”flopped miserably” and more than 99.9 per cent of the rice offered for e-auction remains unsold, he said. ”In any case, it is clear that the Modi Government has greater faith in private traders to control inflation than in state governments and the public distribution system,” the Congress leader said.