Food Security Farce
Dhirendra Jha
India has a shameful track record of tackling hunger: worse even than some of the poorest countries in the world. According to the UN’s Global Hunger Index 2009, which ranked countries on three leading indicators – prevalence of child malnutrition, rates of child mortality, and the proportion of people who are calorie deficient - India ranked 65th out of 88 countries. India lagged behind countries like Uganda (38th); Mauritania (40th); Zimbabwe (58th) and even war-torn nations, as well as India's neighbours Nepal and Pakistan.
India's boasts of being the second fastest growing economy in the world are mocked by its millions who go hungry – and especially by its hungry children. 43.5 per cent Indian children under the age of five were underweight (between 2002 and 2007) and the under five-year-age infant mortality rate in 2007 was 7.2 per cent.
Recent reports in an English daily show vast empires of hunger across India. They record children eating mud to quell hunger in the constituency in Uttar Pradesh of India's first PM; slow-malnutrition deaths and early ageing of men and women in their 30s and 40s in Bolangir, Orissa; children surviving on wild berries and red ants in Jharkhand’s East Singhbhum district; children with bellies distended by malnutrition being treated by tribal rituals of lancing with red-hot rods in the absence of medical care.
In this context, the proposal for a National Food Security Act is an essential though much-delayed step. However, the UPA Government's steps towards enacting this piece of legislation make a mockery of 'food security.'
The Government is yet to make public its draft of the Food Security Bill. But versions of the draft Bill (prepared for consideration by the Empowered Group of Ministers) that are unoffically in circulation are disturbing.
In the first place, any such legislation is expected to define “Food Security” as a right of every citizen. The draft Bill begins by undermining this right, since at the very outset it says that the Bill is intended to “provide a statutory framework to entitle families living below the poverty line to certain minimum quantities of foodgrains per month through targeted public distribution system.” The very idea of restricting the right to adequate and nutritious food to a section of the population defined as 'poor' by a 'poverty line' flies in the face of the concept of food security as a universal entitlement. Food security must be for all, and cannot be tied to the 'targeted' PDS system.
An economist who has access to another variation of the draft Bill says that it introduces further restrictions: “The provisions of this Act will not be applicable to areas affected by extremist or terrorist/naxalite activities or insurgency. Provisions of this Act may not be applicable also during periods of war/external aggression, financial emergency, etc.”
Moreover, the Government is actually shrinking existing entitlements in the name of enacting 'food security'! The law proposes to reduce the entitlement of grain per family from the existing 35 kg (endorsed even by the Supreme Court) to 25 kg.
The Planning Commission has recently accepted the Tendulkar Committee's recommendation that the number of people living below the poverty line in India is 37.2 per cent of the total population, stipulating however that this benchmark for poverty will be applicable “for the limited purposes of food security.” This, while various other commissions and institutions have calculations a much higher incidence of poverty. Even the Supreme Court has recently defined anyone earning less than Rs. 100 a day as poor. We must insist that in the first place food security be delinked from shifting definitions of 'poverty.' And further, 'poverty' cannot be defined arbitrarily from above by Central (or even State) Governments. Rather than trapping poverty in the web of competing Commissions to define the 'poor,' we must rather insist on the automatic inclusion in the BPL category of all unorganised workers, all agricultural workers, all those employed in insecure and ill-paid jobs including ASHA/anganwadi workers and para-teachers, and all small peasants. And the BPL lists must be prepared at the grassroots through panchayats in a transparent and accountable manner, subject to public scrutiny and social audit. All BPL families must then be entitled to 50 kgs of grain at the rate of Rs. 2 per kg, as well as pulses and oil.
It has moreover been pointed out that nutritional security cannot be guaranteed by restricting entitlements to rice/wheat. Other nutritious grains, vegetables, milk, etc all need to be brought under the orbit of food entitlement if the Act is to really introduce any food security for the mass of India's malnourished children and women.
The Centre is seeking to palm off the whole task of selecting BPL families to meet a pre-fixed BPL quota imposed by the Centre. The intention is clearly to try and make State Governments bear the political burden of exclusions from the BPL lists – while the Centre claims credit for the legislation itself!
Instead of solving the problems of corruption that dog the existing system, the Bill will continue it. The fair price shops as envisaged by the Bill will institutionalise privatisation in the delivery mechanism, by permitting private individuals to be licenced dealers. The Bill allows the fair price shops to sell other items. Are fair price shops to be agencies of food security or centres of businesses in hunger ridden areas? The entire PDS system should be overhauled and fair price shops should be directly run by the Government and provide all essential items of food security and nutrition including subsidised fuel.
The Bill in its current from must be rejected to prevent the ridiculing of the hungry and malnourished in the country.