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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Food security channels by Indira Rajaraman

Poverty lines have been in the news again. This round started when a Planning Commission affidavit to the Supreme Court placing the poverty line at Rs 26 per capita per day (rural), Rs 32 (urban), raised a furore over the use of these to set a cap on the percentage of the population covered by the food security Bill.

Since then, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. The latest version of the Bill under consideration proposes coverage of an ambitious 75 per cent of the population (rural) and 50 per cent (urban). There will be a priority set, stipulated at 46 per cent (rural), and 28 per cent (urban). The benefits will be terraced, with a larger subsidy margin and deeper entitlement for the priority set. Field identification of those falling in these categories will be based on the ongoing Socio-economic and Caste Census (SECC), a sequel to the 2010 population census.

The population targeted for coverage will be reached through households as an access channel. There will also be channels accessible by individuals, such as community kitchens for destitutes. Another channel targeting individuals provides for meals for pregnant and lactating women and children up to six years. The Bill will also carry supplementary funding for added nutritional content to the basic school mid-day meal, for children below 14 years of age.

The fiscal cost of all this will extend well beyond the Centre to the states. The present food security system has over time evolved (rightly) towards a more flexible accommodation of state preferences. Within their stipulated shares of the central foodgrain allotment, states have over the years fought free to devise their own coverage patterns, and with that to enhance the subsidy margin under the public distribution system (PDS) should they so choose.

Where the subsidy margins are very large (all the way to free rice in Tamil Nadu), states have typically tried to contain the fiscal cost either by restricting the population covered, or where access is thrown open to all (as in Tamil Nadu), by restricting the quantum of foodgrain supplied. They will now be compelled to conform to national coverage levels, and to nationally prescribed quantities in kilogrammes per capita, while at the same time unable because of a prior political commitment to reduce the subsidy margin itself. They may quite simply collapse fiscally.

The Centre’s food supplement could have been loaded onto the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, a national safety net based on self-selection into manual work on public projects. States would then remain free to devise their own food subsidy schemes. Self-selection through workfare is in any case the best kind of safety net in a country where households move in and out of food sufficiency, as a function of a number of factors.

The chief defect in the present design of the Bill is that the priority segment is identified through households rather than as a demographic segment cutting across households. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS), in its third round in 2005-06, revealed that 45 per cent of children under the age of three were physically stunted for lack of food, averaged across rural and urban India. The Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) directly addresses this segment at present, regardless of the economic status of the household from where they originate. Luckily, ICDS centres have been retained in the latest version of the bill as a food distribution point, in place of the large one-time cash receipt proposed as a replacement for ICDS in some quarters. Cash payments will instantly be loaned out on informal credit markets, and will not be sequestered for food purchases.

How effective is the ICDS as an access channel for the most vulnerable segment of the Indian population, children under three? Luckily, the NFHS itself collected data on access to the ICDS, and these data for rural India have now been analysed in an excellent recent paper by Monica Jain. The ICDS works in two channels. Children in the 0-2 age group get a daily foodgrain entitlement for the mother to take home, and they do not have to walk very far to get it because 91.5 per cent of rural villages are reported in the paper to have an ICDS centre. Older children in the 2-5 age group get cooked food at the ICDS centre in situ.

The paper reports that the physical stature of girl children in the 0-2 age group whose mothers accessed the facility daily was higher, relative to other girl children of the same age. For boys, the difference was not statistically significant. These results are encouraging and plausible. Female infants are better fed when the cost of feeding them (and the lactating mother) goes down. Male infants are fed the same even when food is not free. For children in the 2-5 age group fed daily on site, ICDS children were no better off than other children in the age group. Since attending children are opted in, if their nutritional status is no different from that of those not opting in, this suggests an improvement over the counterfactual, what it would have been without the facility.

However, the NFHS data reveal that only six per cent of the potential catchment of children of age 0-2 actually accessed the take home food ration on a daily basis. In the higher age group, only 14.5 per cent accessed the free food at the centre daily. Only 35 per cent of children accessed the ICDS at all, across both age groups. If this is supply constrained, it suggests that the food Bill will work on the ground only with better inventory monitoring at ICDS nodes.

The ICDS is the only scheme which directly targets the most vulnerable segment of the Indian population — children under three and their mothers, and the retention of this channel is the best feature of the latest version of the food security Bill.

The author is Honorary Visiting Professor, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi