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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The Food Security Debate in India -Jean Drèze

The Food Security Debate in India -Jean Drèze

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published Published on Jul 17, 2013   modified Modified on Jul 17, 2013
-The New York Times Blog


The right to food is finally becoming a lively political issue in India. Aware of the forthcoming national elections in 2014, political parties are competing to demonstrate - or at least proclaim - their commitment to food security. In a country where endemic undernutrition has been accepted for too long as natural, this is a breakthrough of sorts.

The rhetoric, however, is not always matched by understanding of the issues, let alone action. The National Food Security Bill taken up by Parliament in December 2011 in pursuance of electoral promises made by India's governing coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, is at the heart of the current debate over food security. The bill was to be put to vote during the last session of Parliament, along with a series of amendments based on the report of a parliamentary standing committee. Opposition parties, however, continuously disrupted the proceedings under one pretext or another.

Exasperated by this obstruction, and quite possibly hoping to win votes, the government recently promulgated the National Food Security Ordinance 2013. The ordinance effectively activates the bill, but it must be ratified by Parliament within six weeks of its first sitting or else the bill will lapse. The use of emergency powers to promulgate this ordinance is being criticized as undemocratic, and rightly so, but most political parties bear some responsibility for this outcome.

The bill is a modest initiative. It consolidates various food-related programs and entitlements that have made gradual headway during the last decade. Provisions of the bill dealing with food grain entitlements under the public distribution system have grabbed most of the attention. Children's entitlements, however, are possibly more important. These include cooked midday meals for all school-going children and nutritious food (either a cooked meal or a take-home ration) for all children below the age of 6. These child nutrition programs are already in place; they are mandatory under Supreme Court orders. Permanent legal entitlements could strengthen and energize these initiatives.

The bill also provides for maternity benefits - 1,000 rupees ($16) per month for six months - for all pregnant women. This is a small step, and since the benefits are not indexed to inflation, their real value could erode very quickly. Nevertheless, the principle of universal maternity benefits is important and provides a useful foothold for further action.

The bill is effectively what remains of bolder proposals initially discussed at the National Advisory Council. The council's early drafts of the bill included many provisions that were quietly dropped, one by one, first by the council itself and later by the government: social security pensions, special entitlements for vulnerable groups, community kitchens and strong accountability measures, among others.

Ironically, even as the central government pruned and diluted the council's proposals, the eastern state of Chhattisgarh, ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main opposition party, built on them and prepared its own Chhattisgarh Food Security Act, enacted in December 2012. Chhattisgarh's much stronger legislation is in place and a recent survey by the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi suggests that food-related programs in Chhattisgarh are quite effective. This experience in one of India's poorest states helps to dispel the notion that the food security proposals are impractical or unaffordable.

Some provisions in the bill are based on considerable experience and evidence. The value and effectiveness of India's school meal program are reasonably well established. The program, inspired by Tamil Nadu's pioneering initiatives, covers more than 100 million children and has steadily improved over time. In several states, for instance, the school-meal menu now includes eggs, a very valuable source of animal protein for growing children. In Tamil Nadu, schoolchildren get an egg every day. This is not a trivial matter in a country where millions of poor children rarely get a chance to eat an egg.

Several studies have documented the wide-ranging benefits of school meals in India, from higher school attendance and better child nutrition to remunerative employment for rural women and the erosion of caste barriers. The case for a permanent school meal program under the law is widely accepted.

The controversial parts of the bill relate to the Public Distribution System. Food commodities, mainly rice and wheat, have been distributed at subsidized prices for a long time to Indian households, according to the type of ration card they possess: A.P.L. (above poverty line) and B.P.L. (below poverty line). The bulk of food subsidies are meant to reach households in the latter category, which comprises about one-third of the population. But the process of targeting these households has proved very cumbersome, unreliable and divisive. At least three national surveys show that about half of all poor households in rural India do not have a B.P.L. card. Further, as the economist Amartya Sen pointed out 20 years ago, "benefits meant exclusively for the poor often end up being poor benefits." This is one reason why the performance of the Public Distribution System has been far from satisfactory in many states.

Other states, however, have dropped the distinction between households above and below the poverty line and moved toward a more inclusive approach. In Tamil Nadu, the food distribution system covers everyone and works very well. Other states that have also moved toward a more inclusive system in recent years include Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Orissa and Rajasthan, among others. All of them have combined this move with other reforms of the Public Distribution System, and the results have been impressive.

Chhattisgarh's experience is particularly interesting because it used to have a very inefficient and corrupt system. It was turned around in a few years based on a clear political decision to make it work. Today, a large majority of rural households in Chhattisgarh are entitled to 35 kilograms (77 pounds) of rice every month at a nominal price. By all accounts, distribution is highly regular, and the system makes a major contribution to economic security in rural areas. There is a crucial lesson here for the national food security bill.

Indeed, the bill can be seen as an opportunity to extend these achievements across the country. Under the bill, 75 percent of the rural population and 50 percent of the urban population will be entitled five kilograms of grains (rice, wheat or millets) per person per month at a nominal price. This means that about half of the recipients' grain requirements will be taken care of by the Public Distribution System. Further, the roadmap for system reforms that has emerged from recent experience is partly included in the bill.

However, the bill has many flaws as far as the Public Distribution System is concerned. For instance, the identification of eligible households is left to the discretion of the government. In the absence of clear eligibility criteria, no one is really entitled to anything as a matter of right; this defeats the purpose of having a law. Similarly, the overnight imposition of per-capita food entitlements on a system that is currently based on household entitlements is likely to be very disruptive. The promulgation of an ordinance, unfortunately, severely constricts (without precluding) further discussion of these and related issues in Parliament.

Media reports give the impression that the bill involves a major expansion of the Public Distribution System. In fact, it is more a restructuring than an expansion, as aggregate food grain allocations will remain much the same. The distribution, however, will change, with poorer states getting more and poor households being at much lower risk of exclusion. And the current food grain quota for households above the poverty line, which has become a huge, corruption-ridden dumping ground for excess food stocks in recent years, will be much better utilized.

Some of the criticisms of the bill are a trifle ill-informed. Many critics cite wildly exaggerated estimates of the costs of the bill and barely consider the economic benefits. Others cite a Planning Commission of India report that found more than half of distributed food grains end up in the black market. That particular report was published in 2005 and is based on data collected in the late 1990s. Much has changed in the meantime, even if corruption in the Public Distribution System remains an important issue.

A more pertinent criticism is that the Public Distribution System is expensive and that cash transfers would serve much the same purpose at lower cost. In some circumstances, cash transfers are certainly appropriate. Cash-based social security pensions for widows and the elderly are doing relatively well in India and deserve to be expanded.

However, there are many good reasons to be skeptical of a hasty transition from food subsidies to cash transfers. The infrastructure required for mass transfers in cash would take a long time to build. The Public Distribution System, on the other hand, is in place, and huge food grain stocks - more than 80 million tons and growing - are available, so why not make good use of them without delay?

In any case, the bill does not preclude a transition to cash transfers if and when they prove to work better than food subsidies - not just in theory but also on the ground. The immediate issue is not "cash versus food," but to put in place an effective system of income support and social security. Leaving poor people to their own devices is neither socially just nor smart economic policy.

The biggest challenge is to build a serious political backing for food security, as has already happened to a limited extent in specific states. Under the cover of supporting the bill, opposition parties seem to be trying to scuttle it, out of fear that it will help the United Progressive Alliance to stay in power in the next national elections. The government's own commitment to the bill is not entirely clear. A section of the governing coalition certainly wants it, as seen in the ordinance approved last week, but four years of dilly-dallying are hard to understand without an element of internal resistance.

Finally, the food security bill is a fraction of what is required to tackle India's enormous nutrition problems. The battle for the right to food is far from over.

Jean Drèze is a development economist and visiting professor at Allahabad University. He is a co-author, with Amartya Sen, of "An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions."


The New York Times, 9 July, 2013, http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/the-food-security-debate-in-india/


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