Even as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act enters its sixth year, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said in Delhi on Thursday that cash transfers were the answer to the eternal questions about inefficiencies in government schemes. He had tried out direct cash transfers in his effort to give Bihar’s girls bicycles, he said, and discovered that the programme had a “92 per cent success rate”. No programme, he said,...
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PM’s panel splits hairs, misses the elephants on food security by Biraj Patnaik
The report of the Rangarajan Committee scrutinizing proposals of the National Advisory Council for the National Food Security Bill makes for a very instructive read. It's official now: UPA II is on a death wish, and it could not have been articulated better. The alacrity with which the prime minister set up this committee (remember, he could not find time in three years to convene the nutrition council he chairs)...
More »Diluting the Right to Food by CP Chandrasekhar
The promise made by UPA II that it will ensure food security for Indians through legislation that guarantees the Right to Food seems, in its view, to have been an error. In a multi-stage process that reflects the pulls and pressures within the policy-making elite, the Food Security Bill has been diluted so much that it marks a reversal rather than an advance compared to the status quo. Let us...
More »Kind to cash by Richard Mahapatra
The government has a plan to reach welfare to the poor without wasting money. It wants to put hard cash in their hands instead of spending on welfare programmes. To begin with, it wants to end the public distribution system of food grain and give money directly to the people. Its logic: the new system of cash transfer will plug leakages and save an enormous amount of money. But is it...
More »A platter of blather by Pratap Bhanu Mehta
The debate over food security is becoming an exercise in callow dissimulation, where we devote our energies to ensure that food security remains a mirage. The core objective should be simple. It is a scandal that after two decades of high growth, India still does not make adequate nutrition available to large sections of the population. There is simply no financial, technological or production related reason why this should be...
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