Subsidies to be transparent: Govt

The finance ministry on Tuesday informed Parliament that the government was evolving a policy on targeting subsidies, mainly explicit subsidies on food, fertiliser and petroleum after discussions with stakeholders.

S S Palanimanickam, minister of state for finance, in reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, said the government was making efforts to ensure that benefits of subsidies were maximised by making them transparent, well designed and targeted.

He said many reviews and evaluation studies had pointed out that even in the case of food subsidies, benefits had accrued to non-needy sections, apart from illegal diversion of food grain to the market.

The government has not quantified the extra expenditure on account of such diversion as much of these were clandestine activities and any estimate would be subjective, he said.

The government has already submitted a report on subsidies to Parliament, which was discussed in a meeting of the consultative committee of the ministry of finance on February 8, 2005, he said.