India faces a “severe” drought but the country’s ample food grain stock will ensure no one goes hungry, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Saturday.
Monsoon rains, the lifeline for farms that support more that half of India’s 1.1 billion population, have been scant and about 40 percent of India’s districts have declared a drought.
“No one has control over drought. It’s a severe drought,” said Singh during a trip to the arid western state of Rajasthan to inaugurate a giant new oilfield, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
India’s Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Saturday the country faced a 24 percent annual rainfall deficiency, but patchy rains are expected during the end of the monsoon season.
“The last few sporadic showers could help the winter crop that is sown around October-November,” said B.P. Yadav, director of the IMD.
Singh said there were sufficient food grain stocks to support the Public Distribution System, a government network that manages food distribution and the supply of grains to poor households at subsidized levels.
“We will ensure that people below the poverty line are not hit,” he said.
Commodity experts say India’s current food stocks are enough to feed the poor who would be eligible for state support for three months.
For India’s 235 million farmers, a bad monsoon can spell financial disaster because of the lack of irrigation.
Low rains have ravaged India’s rice, cane sugar and groundnut crops, and have disrupted the flow of water into the main reservoirs that are vital for hydropower generation and winter irrigation.
Traders and commodity analysts said the challenge for the government is to maintain a steady supply of foodgrains in the market to ensure stable prices and prevent hoarding and black marketing.
“India has ample stock of foodgrains but the supply system is marred by corruption at several levels, the food allocated to the poor is often siphoned off by making false entries in the records,” said Keshav Kejriwal, an analyst with a private commodity trading firm in New Delhi.
Rajasthan, where the prime minister visited on Saturday, has declared a drought in 26 out of 33 districts leading to an expected 50 percent cut in the crops due to poor monsoon this year, Kejriwal said .
Kejriwal said traders are already hoarding rice and the prices of pulses have risen by more than 12 percent in the last three months.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing