The Director-General of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, Dr. Jacques Diouf, announced at the Inter-Governmental Committee on World Food Security (CFS) that the combination of global food crisis and economic recession had taken the number of people affected across the world to over one billion. He described the number as “unacceptably high,” higher than in 1996 when the heads of states and governments committed themselves to reducing hunger by...
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Food Security Sans PDS: Universalization Through Targeting? by Smita Gupta
The case of the Food Security Bill gets curiouser and curiouser. What started off as a fight between universalization and targeting has ended (or so it would seem) in a complete victory in the National Advisory Council, Government of India (NAC) for targeting through universalization (if such a thing was possible), with the honourable exception of Prof Jean Dreze, who has to be commended for his ‘note of disagreement’. On...
More »Challenging task
'The creaky PDS will not be able to do the job.' The recommendations of the National Advisory Council for the National Food Security Act, made after much discussion and many revisions, cast the net wide to include 75 per cent of the country’s population within the purview of the scheme.It is the most ambitious food entitlement scheme conceived anywhere in the world and the conceptual and implementation problems are very daunting....
More »Think Beyond PDS
Will UPA-II's ambitious food security programme work? The issue gains immediacy, with the National Advisory Council unveiling a new draft plan envisaging legal entitlement to subsidised foodgrain for at least 75 per cent of the population. That works out to almost 800 million people. If implemented, this means the government's food subsidy bill will be far bigger. Also, our groaning public distribution system will come under greater strain. Now, central...
More »Taking on NAC, babu calls for PDS wind-up by Rajeev Deshpande
While the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council's proposal on enhanced food security hinges on higher procurement and increased reliance on the public distribution system, there is a strong view in the government that overworking a creaking system is a bad idea. In a paper circulated within the government, chief economic adviser to the finance ministry Kaushik Basu has argued that what is needed for food security to work is a reduced...
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