India's foodgrain support system in one view: what the government buys, what it holds against buffer norms, and where the grain goes — PDS, welfare, open-market sale to processors, ethanol. Data: DFPD Foodgrain Bulletin (Nov 2024), DFPD Annual Report 2024-25, PIB Year-End Review 2025, data.gov.in. Units: lakh metric tonnes (LMT). KMS = Kharif Marketing Season (paddy/rice), RMS = Rabi Marketing Season (wheat), DCP = Decentralized Procurement Scheme.
FCI Grain Flow — Procurement · Storage · Disposal
What this dashboard is actually tracking
The Food Corporation of India runs a three-stage pipeline that moves grain from farmer to citizen: it procures rice and wheat at government-announced support prices during the Kharif and Rabi marketing seasons, holds that grain in a mix of its own and hired warehouse capacity against mandatory buffer-stock norms, and then disburses it through the public distribution system, welfare schemes, and open-market sales back to processors. Every chart below is one stage of that pipeline. As of 1 January 2025, central-pool stocks stood at 476.85 lakh metric tonnes (LMT) against a buffer norm of 214.1 LMT — a surplus of 262.75 LMT over the minimum the system is required to hold, built up through a record 832.17 LMT of paddy procured in KMS 2024-25 (paying roughly 1.19 crore farmers directly) and 300.35 LMT of wheat in RMS 2025-26. That combined procurement effort moved ₹1.99 lakh crore in food subsidy in FY25 — ₹1.29 lakh crore through FCI directly and ₹0.70 lakh crore through the states running their own Decentralized Procurement Scheme.
Storage capacity behind that stock is split across six distinct channels, not one system: state agencies including the State Warehousing Corporations hold the largest share at 365.7 LMT, FCI's own owned godowns hold 147.2 LMT, and the remainder — 102.7 LMT via hired SWC space, 85.2 LMT via the Private Entrepreneur Guarantee (PEG) scheme, 43.1 LMT via other hired arrangements, and 32.8 LMT via the Central Warehousing Corporation — is capacity FCI leases rather than owns outright. On the disposal side, the National Food Security Act's TPDS/NFSA channel remains the largest single outflow every year in this series, with PMGKAY's Covid-era free-grain tranches (merged into NFSA from January 2024) and OMSS(D) open-market e-auction sales to processors and millers as the other major routes grain actually takes out of the buffer.
The one place this dashboard connects to fuel, not food
One card in this dashboard sits outside the procurement-storage-disposal frame and is worth calling out on its own: a diesel-to-CNG fuel-shift comparison for farm tractor operation, sized to a 1.5-hectare paddy household. Running a tractor on CNG instead of diesel costs roughly ₹378 an hour against ₹498 an hour on diesel — a 24 per cent saving, or about ₹120 an hour, before counting any additional income from selling crop residue into a compressed-biogas (CBG) supply loop rather than burning it. That's the same underlying gas-versus-diesel economics this blog's separate reporting on data-centre and telecom-tower backup power and on the CNG retail-outlet network found holding at very different scales — a single farm household's tractor-hour cost, a telecom tower's diesel generator, and a data centre's multi-megawatt backup plant all sit on the same basic cost curve, because compressed gas is structurally cheaper to run than diesel almost everywhere it's been compared on this blog. The framing in this dashboard's own build notes is specific about why that matters for a farm household in particular: a CNG or CBG-linked saving is real-income-protective in a way a diesel saving isn't, because gas pricing under the government's ethanol/biogas programmes doesn't track imported-fuel inflation the same way diesel does.
What would fix this
- The Department of Food and Public Distribution should publish central-pool stocks against the buffer norm as a monthly downloadable series on a fixed release date, so figures like the 476.85 LMT against 214.1 LMT on 1 January 2025 can be kept current instead of going stale for more than a year.
- The Department of Food and Public Distribution should publish state-wise procurement for each marketing season within three months of its close, so a state's share of the pool, such as Punjab's roughly 47 per cent of wheat, is not available only for a season that is already two cycles old.
- FCI and the Department of Food and Public Distribution should report rice procurement in every release in both paddy and rice-equivalent terms, stating the out-turn ratio applied, so the 832.17 LMT paddy figure and the 544.8 LMT rice figure can be reconciled without guesswork.
- FCI should publish its annual storage cost per tonne for each channel — owned godowns, CWC, hired SWC space, PEG and other hired capacity — together with the cost of holding stock above the buffer norm, so the price of a 262.75 LMT surplus held mostly in leased space is visible.
These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.
About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.
