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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Food security is a basic right-Brinda Karat
-The Times of India

The present food Bill legalises the injustices of a targeted distribution system

A national campaign throughout the month of July on issues related to food security and against rising prices will culminate in a five-day sit-in protest in Delhi beginning today. These are issues fundamental to the well-being of the majority of our people and therefore deserve national support.
 
With the spectre of drought haunting the countryside, speculators, hoarders and blackmarketeers are back in business. Prices of essential commodities like pulses, edible oil, sugar and salt are going through the roof. Vegetables are out of reach of the average family with the price of a kilo of potatoes increasing by over 100% in the last month. The majority of Indians earn their living in the unorganised sector marked by low and fluctuating incomes with no dearness allowance. Any rise in prices causes havoc in the lives of millions of families.

According to earlier data, an Indian, on average, spent as much as 53% of total expenditure on food requirements. With relentless food inflation this percentage would be far higher now. In comparison, Americans, on average, spend 9.3% of their income on food, in Italy a family on average spends 25.7%, in Japan 19.1%, in France 16.3%, in the United Kingdom 11.5%. While there is a difference in the method of calculation between India and the others, it does emphasise the Indian reality of higher food prices and lower levels of disposable income than other countries.

But the UPA government, preoccupied with its internal squabbles, cares little for the insecurity rising prices and consequent food deprivation causes Indian families. For the government this is collateral damage in its mission to implement pro-corporate reform (PCR) and cut food subsidy.

This started in the initial period of PCR in the 1990s by the introduction of the targeted system through the categorisation of people as poor and non-poor, with only the former being eligible for subsidised grain. This is the bizarre logic of targeting.

The sham estimates of poverty by the Planning Commission became the basis on which to exclude people. In spite of national outrage against the present poverty line figures of Rs 26 a day for an adult in rural India and Rs 32 for an adult in urban India (at 2010-11 prices) these still continue as the basis for access to the public distribution system.

The critical issue here is to reverse targeting and ensure a universal public distribution system. This is estimated to cost the exchequer an additional Rs 25,000 to Rs 30,000 crore, a small price to pay for a country, which has the largest malnourished population in the world. But this is too much for the UPA government, which prefers to give tax concessions worth Rs 5 lakh crore in a single year to the rich.

This approach is now reflected in its policy regarding the surplus foodgrain stocks it holds. The buffer stock in the month of July, according to the quarterly buffer stock norms India has, should be 3.3 crore tonnes. Current stocks are as high as 8.2 crore tonnes. Instead of distributing these surplus stocks to the millions of families wrongly defined as non-poor, the government has chosen to permit exports "to liquidate the stocks". Most of the exported foodgrain will be ultimately used as feed for livestock converted to animal products in developed countries.

The government sees nothing unethical about subsidising grains for foreign cattle but not for its own people. The decision to export is influenced by agribusiness lobbies, which want to take advantage of rising wheat prices in the international market driven upwards by reported crop damage in major wheat growing areas across the globe.

This is very similar to what happened during the NDA regime. At that time the food stocks were around six crore tonnes and the government sold them off to foreign traders at BPL prices. It had also made open market sales to grain traders at subsidised prices giving them a subsidy of between Rs 7,000 and Rs 8,000 crore. At that time the Congress in opposition had protested. Today, the BJP in opposition is also protesting. But as the facts show, the policies regarding food are no different between the Congress and the BJP.

The right to food must be recognised as a basic right of people and must be backed by legislation. However, the Food Security Bill presently before the parliamentary standing committee makes a mockery of food security by legalising the present injustices of the targeted system. The Left parties have opposed the Bill in its present form. Not only does the Bill retain the APL and BPL categories, it centralises all powers in the hands of the central government and thus undermines any positive measures for food security taken by some of the state governments.

There are utter absurdities in definitions in the Bill. For example, in the section on special groups, a differentiation is made between those in starvation and those in destitution with the former being eligible to two free meals while the latter can get only one. Can any sane person find any difference between a person in starvation defined as "prolonged deprivation of food threatening survival", and destitution defined as those who "have no support for food and nutrition enabling their survival?"

But World Bank indoctrinated economists can find the subtle difference between equally hungry people to decide who will get two free meals and who only one.

The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP.