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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Poor get less food from Sonia's NAC

The National Advisory Council, headed by Congress President Sonia Gandhi, on Saturday settled for a much less ambitious National Food Security Act than it had previously agreed to.

Scaling down its recommendations, it decided to recommend subsidised foodgrains for 46% of the rural Indian population and 28% of the urban population.

The pruning of the recommendation had an immediate fallout, with the NAC member Jean Dreaze, face of the right-to-food security campaign, submitting a dissent note. He accused the government of pressuring the NAC pressure to accommodate its demands, and turn the Bill into a minimalist proposal.

"Constraints imposed by the government that do not leave scope for anything like what is required to address the problem of hunger and undernutrition. The NAC proposals are a great victory for the government -- they allow it to appear to be doing something radical for food security, but it is actually more of the same," Dreaze said in his note.

The NAC has recommended that 48% rural and 28% urban population will get 35 kg of food grains every month. Rice will be given at Rs 3 a kg, wheat at Rs 2 a kg and millets at Rs 1 a kg.

The reverse flip came after the Congress chief was convinced by the PM of limiting the subsidy burden and expanse of the scheme, and she also expressed her reservations about the difficulty of justifying why those living above the poverty line would get the same benefits as the poor.

The NAC also recommended that those living above the poverty line but not well off -- 44% and 22% in rural and urban areas, respectively -- will be entitled to 20 kg a month at half the price that the government pays for the foodgrains -- less than the APL prices at the moment.

If one were to club both the categories, roughly 90% of rural India and 50% of urban India would be able to enjoy the benefits of the UPA-II's flagship scheme.

The government, led by the Planning Commission and the PMO, played a crucial role in whittling down the earlier recommendations of the NAC members who had wanted a more expansive, though not universal, extension of the food bill across the country.

Reducing the entitlements provided to those living above the poverty line and sticking to Tendulkar's figures for the population living below the poverty line will now ensure that the overall additional food subsidy remains below Rs 18,000 crore annually.

The PM, sources said, had stepped in, to put an upper limit on the amount of additional funds the government would provide for the scheme. Sources said, after initially suggesting the government would be able to afford an additional Rs 22,000 crore annually, the suggested amount was further reduced to Rs 18,000 crore annualy, which forced the NAC to reduce the entitlement for APL from 35 kg to 25 kg per month.

The NAC had to also back off from its earlier proposal that the government select the poor on the basis of their social groupings -- SCs/STs, single women households and other vulnerable groupings being selected automatically. While the NAC wanted the selection criteria to be also built into the provisions of the law, this would now be decided by the government separately with the artificial cut-off percentages of the beneficiaries being mandated by the Planning Commission for every state on the basis of Tendulkar report computation.

The NAC also had to backtrack on the other benefits it had earlier recommended under the NFSA with the PM opposing the inclusion of pensions and child development services and removing any reference to even future entitlements to clean water and sanitation.

"The non-PDS entitlements, for their part, have been diluted beyondrecognition. Entire fields of intervention that are crucial for food security (such as child development services and old age pensions) have been left out of the final proposals," Dreze said.