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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Sonia backs food G8 by Radhika Ramaseshan

The National Advisory Council today won a victory over the government with Sonia Gandhi stressing the inclusion of eight “highly vulnerable” groups among the priority beneficiaries of the food security bill.

Sources said the rural development ministry, headed by Vilasrao Deshmukh, had been resisting the panel’s recommendation for a new category of households that are “highly vulnerable to food insecurity”.

The eight groups identified by Sonia are:

“Particularly vulnerable” tribal groups;

Mahadalits;

Households headed by single women;

Households with disabled persons as sole earning members;

Households headed by minors;

Destitutes dependent on alms;

The homeless;

Any household where even one member is a bonded labourer.

“These groups are unrecognised and ignored by the planners,” a council member said. The eight groups were listed on the basis of the report of the Saxena committee, submitted to the ministry in August 2009.

At today’s council meeting, Sonia also underscored the need to adopt a “social inclusion” approach to “redefine and refine” the conventional methods of classifying economic groups.

A council member said Sonia was forced to reaffirm this point because the “abuse of the methods of identifying the poor has led to frequent and widespread exclusion of the most deserving” from the below-poverty-line (BPL) list.

According to the member, a recent Planning Commission study has shown that more than half of India’s poor either have no food-entitlement card or are given APL (above poverty line) cards that leave them out of the ambit of BPL benefits.

Conversely, the study has revealed that almost 60 per cent of the BPL or Antyodaya cards are given to “non-poor” households.

Apart from the matter of bringing in the “highly vulnerable” groups, sources said, the council’s version of the food security bill is “on track”.

The council has also scored a victory of sorts with the government agreeing to all but one of its suggestions on the Right to Information Act.

After several meetings between officials and council member Aruna Roy, the government has agreed not to reject applications on the ground that they exceed the word limit. It has also agreed that a complaint will not cease to exist after the applicant’s death.

However, the government is still undecided on the rule that debars petitioners from taking up more than one subject in an application.

The advisory council, so far preoccupied with the food security and communal violence bills, today zeroed in on other areas too. Among these were integrating the rural job scheme with the development of natural resources.

“This means that creating jobs will result in more plantations, rainwater harvesting and other eco-friendly measures,” said member Deep Joshi.

The council also focused on pre-school education in villages and slums, and on adopting the Tamil Nadu model of daylong care centres in rural areas so that women can work uninterrupted on their land.

The group on domestic workers’ issues, headed by Mirai Chatterjee, said it would continue to try and persuade the government to bring homes into the ambit of the bill on sexual harassment at the workplace. Homes are the workplace of domestic workers, who are prone to sexual harassment without access to redress mechanisms.

Religion ‘irrelevant’

The Congress today dismissed questions about Sonia’s religion as “irrelevant” following a reported reference to her as “a Christian” by the ambassador to the US, Meera Shankar, a PTI report said.

“This is an irrelevant question. She (Sonia) is a proud Indian and a proud president of a political party which has a long history of Indian heritage,” Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said.

He was responding to questions about the Indian envoy’s reference to “a Christian as the leader of the largest national political party” in India. A newspaper has reported that Shankar, in a speech at a US university on February 24, had referred to Sonia as a Christian and as a testament to India’s pluralism and diversity.