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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

BJP model for blanket food bill by Radhika Ramaseshan


The radicals in the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) are unlikely to give in to the conservatives’ case against the universalisation of food subsidy.

They insisted that not only was universalisation theoretically possible but it also worked “successfully” on the ground.

In what could make the Centre squirm, they cited BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh as an example of what an inclusive public distribution system (PDS) could do.

An indication that the NAC’s radicals were in a mood to push the envelope on Sonia’s food security bill — despite the reservations expressed by agriculture minister Sharad Pawar and a section of the UPA government — was evident in an article written by Jean Dreze, a member of the council, in The Hindu today.

An NAC source hoped Sonia could break her silence on the grey zones in the bill when they meet on July 14. “She is basically supportive of our (the radicals) premises. We will have to see how far she takes them,” the source claimed.

Dreze, with Aruna Roy, Harsh Mander and N.C. Saxena, form the nucleus of a group within the panel that is campaigning for an overhaul of the existing bill. The “conservatives” maintain that it is fiscally untenable to universalise the PDS given the cost of food subsidies.

Dreze, an honorary professor at the Delhi School of Economics, contended that a targeted PDS — as it exists now — was “unreliable and divisive”. Secondly, the tentative calculations suggesting that a comprehensive food security law might cost the state nearly Rs 1 lakh crore was not as much of a “mind-boggling tag” as it sounded.

Dreze wrote that the investigations into the distribution of BPL cards threw up enormous “exclusion errors”. According to the National Sample Survey in 2004-05, half of the rural household falling below the “poverty line” did not have a card.

While he conceded “errors” could be minimised with better BPL identification, he added that there was no reliable way of going about it and it was bound to be a “hit-or-miss” exercise.

“A landless household, for instance, may or may not be poor, and similarly with a Scheduled Caste or female-headed household. The fact that a household may be well-off today, but poor tomorrow (because of, say, illness, displacement or unemployment) does not help matters. Last but not least, the power equations in the rural areas are such that any BPL survey is liable to be manipulated,” Dreze said.

Calling targeting “divisive”, he claimed that a reason why the PDS worked better in Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu was because the system was “inclusive” and ensured that everyone — or at least 80 per cent of the population — had a stake in its proper functioning.

On the projected cost of the food law, Dreze said the amount was “just about 1.5 per cent of India’s GDP”. “Is that an excessive price to pay to protect everyone from hunger?” he asked.