Now, with the sharply higher food grain inventory with the government, the problem of shortage of storage space is expected to become more severe. To deal with the problem, the government is looking into ways to liquidate its rice stock. The Centre has been toying with ideas such as allocating additional grain to the public distribution scheme beneficiaries or diverting additional stock for production of ethanol. The Food Corp has also recommended lowering the offer price of rice under the open market sale scheme to 2,250 rupees per 100 kg from the current price of 2,785 rupees to encourage private purchases, another official had said. The government has earmarked 5 mln tn to be offloaded from the central pool. However, private purchases have remained subdued at only 100 tn out of the total 535,020 tn sold so far.