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.