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Maneka Gandhi Clashes With NITI Aayog on Replacing Food With Cash Transfers -Anoo Bhuyan
-TheWire.in

The government is finalising a pilot project in line with NITI Aayog’s recent suggestion that children and mothers be given cash transfers instead of cooked or uncooked food.

At a conference on under-nutrition organised by the Ministry of Women and Child Development this week, Union minister Maneka Gandhi said that the government is keen to overhaul the Integrated Child Development Service (ICDS) and withdraw the provisions of cooked food and rations to children, and pregnant and lactating women, and replace it with cash transfers. She also said the government will shift the focus of the policy from administering food to administering nutrition.

The move is at odds with recommendations by the health ministry, the National Food Security Act and Supreme Court orders. It is, however, in consonance with the NITI Aayog’s recent recommendations from a 114 page document, ‘Nourishing India’, released earlier this month.

Where Gandhi differs with NITI Aayog is on the issue of cash versus kind. She said that she prefers if “nutrient packets” are directly transferred to children and mothers, via the Indian postal service, instead of sending money.

“A direct benefit transfer in the form of money makes no sense, because in Rs 180, there is no way a mother can feed herself or feed the baby for more than three days,” Gandhi said. She said the government procures the raw food at wholesale rates and thus can provide a better value to beneficiaries of the government scheme. She also said that with direct cash transfers, there would be no way of knowing how the money is spent.

However, at a press conference the next day, the secretary of the women and child development ministry, Rakesh Srivastava, said that the government is still considering moving towards cash transfers and an announcement about this is imminent. Before this, he cited the provision of hot cooked meals and take-home rations in anganwadis as a success of his ministry. Sources aware of these developments said that a large scale pilot project on cash transfers is ready in the ministry and is awaiting the last stages of approval. This is in line with the recent recommendations made by the NITI Aayog.

Gandhi’s suggestion is somewhat of a compromise – moving from hot food to sending nutrient packets. NITI Aayog is suggesting scrapping this system entirely and transferring just money. The government is going to roll out a pilot to collect evidence, on NITI Aayog’s recommendations.

The government’s imminent move towards cash transfers is in harmony with NITI Aayog’s ‘Nourishing India’. In the document, the think tank says, “pilots may be initiated in a few districts to test the efficacy of implementing the ICDS supplementary nutrition component through a cash transfer/conditional cash transfer route, (to be transferred directly in the Jan-Dhan account of the mother), aligned to the framework of the National Food Security Act, 2013.” NITI Aayog says that the cash transfers for ICDS’s provision of take-home-rations would be piloted in states which opt themselves to exercise this “strategy option”.

Under the existing ICDS, a pregnant mother and a new-born child can receive rations worth Rs 7125 over 45 months. This works out to Rs 158 per month. The NITI Aayog document does not say if this is the amount they plan on disbursing through cash.

Gandhi’s concerns that procurement for individual beneficiaries will work out more expensive, is not unknown to NITI Aayog, which says in its document that the figure of Rs 158 per month is based on 2011-2012 prices and hasn’t been revised since. On this, NITI Aayog suggests going along with the women and child development ministry’s move to index the rations according to the consumer price index, as in the case of the mid-day meal scheme.

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