New Delhi, Feb 6 (IANS) Calling for commodity-specific and long- and short-term measures to control price rise, Tamil Nadu Deputy Chief Minister M.K. Stalin Saturday asked the central government to consider fixing a maximum retail price for essential food items.

'The union government may consider imposing upper ceiling on the retail prices of some essential commodities like sugar and tur dal under Section 3A of the Essential Commodities Act,' Stalin said at the chief ministers' conference here.

According to him, the central and the state governments should take commodity-specific measures to control prices of essential items like sugar, pulses, oil and vegetables.

'State government undertakings should also be allowed to import essential commodities,' Stalin said while highlighting the major points of Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi's address, a copy of which was circulated earlier.

'The central government should extend subsidy support to such imports also,' he added.

Stalin also said the minimum support prices of pulses and oilseeds should be close to the market price for increasing their production.

The Tamil Nadu deputy chief minister said that though factors like increasing per capita consumption of food items and rise in income due to welfare measures were behind the price rise, distortions in the market also contributed to the crisis.

Stressing that universal public distribution system (PDS) is better than the targeted PDS Stalin asked the central government to increase allocation of rice and wheat to the states at subsidised rates.