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‘Puppy’ bite in NAC food jab at Pawar by Radhika Ramaseshan

Take a lesson from Commonwealth Games mascot Shera and “leap ahead” instead of whimpering like a “timorous puppy”, a food rights campaigner has said in a sharp attack on Sharad Pawar.

The criticism in a Delhi newspaper has come from Belgium-born Jean Dreze, a prominent member of the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council. He is ostensibly riled by reports that Pawar’s food ministry has rejected two of the council’s key proposals on an envisaged food security law.

Dreze’s criticism cannot be brushed aside as the “fulminations of a frustrated jholawallah” because he is also in the NAC’s working group on food security, a government official said.

The proposals that the food ministry rejected are:

A near-universal public distribution system targeting 80 per cent families in rural areas and 33 per cent in urban areas with a quantum of 35kg rice/wheat at Rs 3 a kg, initially in 150 of India’s poorest districts;

Extending the benefit to 42 per cent of all below-poverty-line rural families and 33 per cent of all BPL urban families. Also, giving 25kg rice/wheat at either Rs 5 or Rs 7.50 per kg to above-poverty-line households in rural areas while excluding urban APL families.

Dreze’s attack has come nine days before the council is due to meet, but it has followed a pattern. Before the last NAC meeting, another member Harsh Mander — also a food rights campaigner and now convener of the food working group — published a similar, though milder, piece in a Delhi daily.

The calculations of the NAC and the food ministry on estimated grain needs and costs have not tallied. The council feels the first proposal would require 70.4 million metric tonnes and the second 70 million metric tonnes. But Pawar’s team has projected that the first would require 76.94 million metric tonnes and the second about the same quantity.

The food ministry, official sources said, has also said that grain procurement to meet the NAC recommendations would be “challenging” because the average annual procurement over the last 10 years was 43.7 million metric tonnes. The ministry has presented a scare scenario, contending the proposals might necessitate imports and a further stretch on India’s fiscal resources, especially if global prices go up.

“Why should the food ministry put out such reports? They could have dealt with us directly. Within the NAC, we were on the verge of finding common ground. I don’t know if the food ministry’s decision will put the clock back,” a council member said on condition of anonymity.

The member was referring to NAC conservatives like Narendra Jadhav and Pramod Tandon, who have of late come round to the NAC’s food security proposals. Both have been regarded so far as the government’s “voices” because of their insistence that “fiscal considerations” are paramount while drawing up a law like this one.

“To say the costs will be negligible is unrealistic. Of course the programme is going to cost money. But it is essential to have food security,” Mander said.

In his article, Dreze has countered each of the food ministry’s arguments, saying “nothing disastrous” was likely to happen if the procurement targets were not met.

“If the gap is small and temporary, it can be imported. Grain can be bought in the open domestic market. The timeframe for extension of the act to the entire country can be extended. And in the worst-case scenario, some people will be getting, say, 30kg instead of 35kg at times. Does it mean that they will burn down the local BDO’s office or take the government to court? Not all all,” he has written.

He said similar apprehensions had been expressed about the rural employment guarantee law. “...but five years later, hardly anyone has gone to court”.

NAC members declined comment on whether they expected Sonia to step into the matter. In the last meeting on September 24, she had cautioned members to take the Centre’s viewpoints and perspectives seriously and not do anything hurriedly.