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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Panel wants PDS to go, cash-for-food to start

Is the government trying to shirk its responsibility of providing a social security net even as it contemplates a right to food act? In a move that could undercut the very logic of UPA’s much-touted right to food Act, the Planning Commission has recommended that the government do away with the public distribution system (PDS) and begin cash-for-food schemes instead.

Running counter to the logic of the much successful mid-day meal scheme and UPA’s claim of providing an enlarged social security net to the poor in its second tenure, the apex planning body has recommended that the government withdraw from distributing food to those below the poverty line and instead leave them with cash to manage food from the market.

The controversial proposal, unsuccessfully mooted once before, suggests that not only the food given under the Targetted PDS to those below poverty line but also a large part of the nutrition provided under the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) be turned into a cash subsidy scheme.

The Planning Commission report suggests that Madhya Pradesh, UP, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Uttarakhand, TN, Orissa, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala and Delhi could be the first states to undertake the cash transfer scheme.

Ironically, the plan panel, while recommending that Food Corporation of India sell grain to private shops from where the poor can buy, admitted that it would be difficult to do so in many parts of rural India simply because private shops do not exist in the first place.

In order to get over this, the planning body has suggested that the operation be tried at first in cities, beginning with New Delhi.

Critics have pointed to the dual problems that cash-for-food schemes cause — leaving the poor vulnerable to fluctuations in market rates of food items and vagaries of supply in open market — the reason why PDS was begun originally.