By getting its agencies to procure wheat at sub-MSP rates and not allowing the farmers to export, the Centre has committed a double injustice. On April 1, at the start of the new harvesting season, India's public wheat stocks, at 15.36 million tonnes, were more than twice the required minimum buffer and strategic reserve of seven million tonnes. On top of that, the size of the crop about to be marketed was reckoned at an all-time-high of 84.27 million tonnes. There could not, arguably, have been a better time to lift the ban on exports, in place since February 2007.