India to get 8 lakh tonne wheat in 30 lakh tonne tender

New Delhi, May 29 (UNI) In a major setback to the wheat import programme, India is likely to fetch a paltry quantity of eight lakh tonnes through international tender floated to import 30 lakh tonnes, STC sources said.

State Trading Corporation (STC) floated a tender to import 30 lakh tonnes wheat on May 8 but due to extraordinarily stringent conditions they received only eight offers to supply 26 lakh tonnes wheat.

"We can't relax our standards now for this tender and one of the bidders, Australia's AWB Ltd is offering only five lakh tonnes wheat meeting these conditions though earlier it was offering 12 lakh tonnes," STC sources said.

The only bidder which is fully meeting the norms, Switzerland's Agrico Trade and Finance SA is supplying only 300,000 tonnes Russian wheat at around US199 dollar per tonne.

Unless AWB offers more than 500,000 tonnes within the stipulated conditions, the likely imports are estimated at only 800,000 tons.

An earlier import of 500,000 tonnes from AWB is also in a limbo with only 92,000 tonnes having arrived while the rest has been held back by Australia's quality inspection agency over quality concerns.

India's Food Corporation of India is in desperate requierment of wheat to run its public distribution system (PDS) and buffer stock maintainence.

It's annual requirement is around 19 million tonnes while the local procurement from farmers is only 9.2 million tons.

They started the year on April 1 with an opening stock of 20 lakh tonnes so the annual shortage is nearly 8.0 million tonnes. However arrival of imported wheat so far is not even one lakh tonne.

Despite acute shortages government is attracting severe flak from farmers organisations and political parties for import of wheat at a higher price than the government's minimum support price for local procurement.

UNI JSS SBJ KP2003