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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Welfare wisdom

-The Indian Express

The Congress’s long-deferred promise, the food security bill, has been cleared by the cabinet and will now be debated and refined in Parliament.

For all its formidable complexity, the draft bill is evasive on some of the fundamentals, like exactly who will be served by the subsidy. Though it has moved away from a narrowly targeted, tightly rationed approach and now intends to make cheap foodgrain readily available to nearly two-thirds of the population, it is unclear how the “priority” and “general” categories will be identified and sorted. The socio-economic and caste census, which was going to determine eligibility, is running behind schedule. Getting this survey right is the key to this legislation and, indeed, to all welfare schemes intended for the poor. It is also a clear call for reform of the notoriously leaky and corruption-ridden public distribution system. The programme should be rolled out in several phases, and it must be incumbent upon states to demonstrate they have efficient working systems before they take it on. The food security programme must be enacted in good faith, not indiscriminately extended as a vote-catching move — and here it could learn from the missteps of MNREGS, the UPA’s other blockbuster welfare initiative. It went rapidly from a 200-district phase-wise affair to cover all of the nation, without having the managerial capacities to deal with this abrupt expansion. The food security legislation must be put in practice with greater care, and the administrative systems to deliver assistance must be installed first.

One of the biggest challenges will be managing procurement — given the scale of the programme, much of the surplus is going to be bought by the government, and private grain trade will inevitably be cramped. To avoid destructive skews in agricultural production, grain should be sourced from all producing regions, not just the traditional procuring regions — which requires upgrading logistics and supply chains. Also, the arguments over the PDS versus food coupons or cash transfers have held up the food security bill for months. Instead of imposing a Centrally scripted plan, states like Bihar and Delhi that volunteer should be encouraged to experiment with pilots of these ideas, so that we can have empirical results on their effectiveness rather than ideological disagreement. This is the opportunity for Parliament to fill in the bill’s large blanks — and make sure the entirely worthy end of providing substantial food security is not undone by shoddy means.