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Limited food plan for poor to start with by Radhika Ramaseshan


The proposed food security law is expected to kick in by next April for a year in one-fourth — or 200 — of the country’s poorest districts or blocks, depending on whichever is administratively tenable.

The proposal — agreed upon by the National Advisory Council (NAC) — is tactically aimed at pleasing food and agriculture minister Sharad Pawar as well as others in the government, Planning Commission and the advisory panel itself which virtually ruled out the plan to universalise food security entitlements.

But the NAC has not jettisoned its agenda of universalising food distribution.

“Time-bound universalisation will be examined as a desirable goal,” said NAC member Mirai Chatterjee, indicating that the food bill will follow the course that was mapped out for the UPA’s earlier big-bang social project, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

The NREGA was initially enforced in 200 districts and later extended to the entire country. The food law is expected to kick in by April 2011. This means that the bill might be introduced in the monsoon session of Parliament after which it will follow the trajectory that most bills do.

It will be referred to a standing committee of Parliament and then approved by the Union cabinet before Parliament takes it up again.

The decision to launch the project in April was taken by the NAC when it met today. If the NAC agreed on a limited coverage for starters, it refused to compromise on the entitlements of 35kg of foodgrain per family at Rs 3 a kg. Pawar and the others wanted the 25kg entitlement to continue.

The NAC, chaired by Sonia Gandhi, also agreed that in the remaining districts, the envisaged legislation should expand the coverage of the public distribution system (PDS) for foodgrain to reach the “really poor”, the urban poor, infants, pre-school children, the differently abled, street kids and HIV and TB patients.

In the meeting that lasted several hours, Sonia went along with the sense that the existing bill against communal violence ought to be discarded and a new one which will pin accountability for crimes of commission and omission on the executive should be drafted.

She agreed with the view that if the Right to Information Act enshrined the belief that “public professionals were subject to civil liability”, the new bill should be underpinned on the principle of “criminal liability of officials to ensure the life and liberty of citizens”.

As The Telegraph has been reporting, the NAC is expected to ask for setting up a command national authority with the right to oversee the executive’s working during communal violence without infringing on the powers of a state. The new bill is also likely to incorporate crimes of sexual violence, in addition to rape.

However, on whether the question of fixing accountability goes right up to the top, NAC sources were evasive. “The question is open,” said a member of the special sub-group revisiting the draft bill.

The NAC will start working with the rural development ministry on the amendments to the food security bill.

It was decided that when the pilot scheme will be at work, the existing allocations for the above poverty line (APL) families will remain.

The idea of enforcing the scheme in blocks rather than districts arose from the perception that within districts there were disparities.

“There are special pockets of hunger and extreme poverty, so blocks might be more feasible because greater numbers of the really poor and vulnerable sections will be covered,” a member said.

However, the members also factored in the circumstance that it was easier to select and administer a district over a block.

While the rural BPL targets will be identified by the criteria laid down by the Tedulkar committee report (42 percent), those among the urban poor will be selected by the norms evolved by the SR Hashim committee that was set up by the Planning Commission in May this year.

It was told to submit its report by September.