Kolkata: Trinamool Congress (TMC) Lok Sabha MP Saugata Roy has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting him to consider ensuring minimum income guarantee for the fair price shop dealers in the context of ‘utterly non-viable conditions’ of these shops.
Roy who happens to be the Chief Advisor of All Bengal Fair Price Shop Dealers’ Welfare Association pointed out that in the recent conference of Food Ministers, some of the states’ food ministers demanded an immediate hike in the margins of the fair price shop dealers to the extent of Rs 200 per quintal.
The letter by the TMC veteran states that the margins of the ration dealers have been hiked by only Rs 20 per quintal from April 2022 after much persuasion by the ration dealers but it is no match with the increase of shop rent, electricity charges, labour charges, wages of the employees of the fair price shops.
“I would relevantly mention in this connection that there had been aspersion on the fair price shop dealers of black marketing and holding spurious ration cards but in the present system of online transactions and Aadhaar seeding of ration cards, such unkind aspersions do not hold water. On the other hand, the exemplary services rendered by the fair price shop dealers during the pandemic, risking their lives for the sake of keeping the PDS (public distribution system) running, can never be underestimated. Infact, many dealers lost their lives in the process,“ read Roy’s letter.
In this backdrop, he has claimed that since all fair price shop dealers function under National Food Security Act (NFSA) and their problems are similar, corrective actions should be taken centrally without passing over the responsibility of the dealers upon the state governments.