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Not A Morsel Of Sense by Neelabh Mishra

The draft food security bill studiedly sidesteps the real problem

An offending official disconnect with the hungry millions of India has been perpetrated by the very group aiming to improve their lot. In the minutes of its meeting of March 12, the empowered Group of Ministers, which cleared a draft food security bill for consideration of the Union cabinet, recorded this audacious passage: “The definition of food security should be limited to the specific issue of foodgrains security (wheat and rice) and be delinked from the larger issue of nutritional security.” As if it’s possible to delink the breath from a living being. But the government seems to think it will work.

Anyone with common sense knows famine is the greatest of food insecurities, and the WHO defines famine, among other things, on the basis of malnutrition. The WHO holds that a community in which 40 per cent of the population has a body mass index (BMI) less than 18.5 is famine-stricken. BMI, as everyone knows, is a measure of nutrition. By this token, many communities in India live in a permanent state of famine. For example, the population of Orissa, of which 40 per cent is malnourished; or the children of India, of whom 46 per cent are malnourished. Even the adult population of India just misses being famine-stricken—33 per cent of it is malnourished, with a BMI under 18.5. Does a bill that does not honestly address malnutrition to secure people against such famine deserve to be called a food security bill?

The disconnect with the reality of hunger in India is painfully obvious. Tragically, in the mandate it creates, the draft threatens to institutionalise inadequacy in different ways. One is at the level of defining food security itself. Consider the quantum of subsidised foodgrain on offer: the bill promises 25 kg of wheat at Rs 2 per kg or rice at Rs 3 per kg. This, as activists in the right to food case have pointed out to the prime minister in a petition against the draft bill, is 10 kg less than what the Supreme Court had asked the government to provide. More disturbingly, by promising only a single-item entitlement (of foodgrains), it totally avoids the issue of balanced nutrition. The second problem is the way even this entitlement will be distributed: the subsidised grain is meant only for the ‘below the poverty line’ (BPL) population, a notoriously amorphous category. By the Planning Commission’s reckoning, only 28 per cent of India’s population—less than the 33 per cent that can be defined as malnourished—is poor. So is the proposed law just a ploy to wriggle out of the commitment that an unwilling executive had to concede before the judiciary?

Let’s not even enter the debate on poverty estimates: as against the Planning Commission’s 28.3 per cent, the N.C. Saxena expert group put India’s poor at 50 per cent, using a calorific index as a reliable criterion for calculating real poverty. The Arjun Sengupta committee, using a flat benchmark expenditure of Rs 20 per day, found 77 per cent of the population to be poor. And the recent Tendulkar committee, with more nuanced criteria, reached an average of 37.2 per cent. Suffice it to say that it’s a grave error to restrict subsidy benefits to ‘identified’ BPL families. Factor in other complexities on the ground: the Justice Wadhwa committee, appointed by the Supreme Court to study PDS reform, found nearly half the poor do not have the BPL cards that will entitle them to government largesse, even the grain promised by the proposed law. The problem, according to the committee, is that the basis for adjudging poverty—expenditure of Rs 15 per day—is too low. If this were changed to the minimum daily wage of Rs 100, the panel found, 70 per cent of Indians would be deemed poor.

Capping poverty statistically will definitely leave most of India’s hungry out of the net of the proposed law. Bihar CM Nitish Kumar wrote to the Centre on June 30, 2009: “We believe any proposal to impose a ceiling on the number of BPL families for implementing the [proposed] act would be fundamentally flawed...it is not prudent to assume the numbers arrived at through any survey, irrespective of the methodology adopted, will necessarily approximate to the numbers fixed by the ceiling.”

The draft bill relies on the same vigilance committees for monitoring corruption in the targeted PDS that the Wadhwa panel found ineffective—they are full of the same MLAs and officials who had appointed the fair price shop dealers. Not surprisingly, the draft also has no room for the ombudsman and lok adalats that Wadhwa has recommended for the redress of grievances. A flawed law can merely provide a loophole to escape meaningful reforms driven by public action and judicial concern. It won’t solve the problem.