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In a village in Uttar Pradesh, food is always on the minds of its residents -Supriya Sharma

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Botched-up beneficiary lists have denied the needy the government rations to which they are legally entitled.

Even though few in eastern Uttar Pradesh’s Baksha village have ever seen the internet, every man, woman and child there knows the word online. Online for them means standing in a queue outside a computer shop with a bundle of documents that the shopkeeper consults as he types away into the computer. At the end of the exercise, people hope, as an old woman said, that their requests “have reached the government”.

Young men often go online for jobs. Recently, young women did it to get smartphones under an official scheme. But what got everybody in Baksha hustling to go online was something rather basic: food.

Food is a preoccupation in Baksha.

According to the 2011 census, 40% of the village’s main working population of 923 people is engaged in agriculture. This is an underestimate because the census counted only 24 women as cultivators, while in reality, more women than men can be spotted working in the fields. Taking just the male working population, the proportion of those engaged in agriculture is as high as 60%.

And yet, the people of Baksha often scrimp on meals.

That’s because land ownership is skewed – a handful of families own large estates while the majority of cultivators have small farms that don’t yield enough to feed their families. Those who do adhia kheti or sharecropping (in which a landowner allows a tenant to use his land in return for a share of the crop produced) have to part with half their produce. Muslims don’t own any land. Dalits, at best, have tiny patches. “Enough to grow garlic and coriander,” said Bhole Nath, a resident of the Harijan basti.

Through January and February, potatoes with rotis and rice was the staple in most kitchens.

In July 2013, the Centre passed the National Food Security Act that guarantees subsidised foodgrains to two-thirds of the country’s population. The Uttar Pradesh government woke up to it in September 2015.

Under the law, the Central government bears the cost of providing five kilos of foodgrains per person per month to 79.6% of Uttar Pradesh’s rural population and 64.4% of its urban population. To implement the law, however, required the state government to identify those eligible for the grains. If the case of Baksha village is anything to go by, this required administrative skills that Uttar Pradesh lacks.

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