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Given here are three for the aam aadmireadings on food security, PDS and TPDS. I would like you to summarize

for me:

1. Issues of food security in India.

2. The PDS/TPDS as trickle down mechanisms.

ON FOOD SECURIRTY , PDS and TPDS

1- The Early Kalidasa Syndrome

Utsa Patnaik

The most valuable resource that a country has is its people. The poor are not a liability, but an asset; they are theproducers of essential goods and services we use, they hold up the sky for us for a pittance of a reward. The least that acountry can do is to ensure that its people get enough to eat, that already low nutritional standards are not compromised.The present government has achieved a dubious record: the level of per head cereal supply and consumption in India by2007 at 174 kg fell below the 182 kg recorded by the least developed countries and was considerably below the 196 kglevel of Africa. By 2008 Indian average cereal consumption fell further steeply to 156 kg owing to large exports andaddition to stocks, and is likely to be lower still in the just-ended drought year.

Cereals account for nine-tenths of food grains, which provide three-quarters of both energy intake and protein intake for

the average consumer. Average calorie intake and protein intake have both fallen since 1993. The fall in per head foodgrain supply and consumption is not new, it has been going on for over a decade, yet our leading economists andpolicymakers have contributed to increasing food insecurity by their refusal to remove the artificial barriers to distributioncreated by arbitrarily dividing the population into below' and above' poverty line.

They remain as unmoved as Kalidasa proverbially hacking away at the very branch on which he sat they would ratherlet food grains rot than feed the poor. What explains this torpor, this near-comatose lack of response to a long-brewingcrisis of increasing hunger? The answer is that they simply fail conceptually to recognise that hunger is growing becauseof the serious misconception they have regarding the behaviour of cereal demand in a developing economy.

John Maynard Keynes had remarked that the world is moved by little else but ideas. Once a wrong idea gets into the headof a policymaker it is very difficult to get it out. Keynes's argument on the paradox of thrift if every person saves morethe nation ends up saving less is still not understood 75 years after the General Theory and Finance Ministers continueto behave like housewives, cutting back spending to balance budgets even though they have to deal with rampant

unemployment. Many ill-advised policies we see creating havoc around us arise from incorrect but obstinately held ideas.

The crucial incorrect idea here is that there is nothing surprising about cereal consumption falling as a countrydevelops and its per head income rises, people diversify their consumption away from inferior' cereals and towardssuperior' food, including milk, eggs, meat, and so on. Most economists thus believe in what they call a negative incomeelasticity of cereal demand' and this influences many others, so they actually interpret declining grain consumption in apositive light. Their idea however arises from ignorance and is factually incorrect. It represents a fallacy of composition,in which only a part of total cereal demand that directly consumed (as boiled rice, chapatti and so on) is taken intoaccount and cereal demanded as livestock feed converted to milk, eggs, meat, and so on is ignored.

Fifty years of data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization show that as average income rises in acountry and diets become more diversified to superior foods, the per head cereal/food grain demand far from falling risessteeply, and average calorie and protein intake rise in tandem. This happens because much more cereals get consumedindirectly as feed converted to animal products.

The higher the average income of a country, the higher is its cereal consumption and the higher the share of the latterwhich is indirectly consumed, as the Table shows. The richest country in the world, the United States, consumed nearly900 kg per head of cereals in 2007 of which only one-eighth was directly eaten and three-fifths used as feed converted toanimal products, with the balance being processed. Its cereal consumption was more than five times higher than the 174kg recorded by India and its normalised calorie intake (namely, deducting 1000 calories as survival level) was two and ahalf times higher than in India.

China has been raising its income fast we are talking of purchasing power parity adjusted U.S. dollars and by now itconverts a massive 115 million tonnes of cereal output as feed to animal products, compared with less than 10 million

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tonnes in India. Its people consume directly as much as Indians do, but owing to more diversified diets they consumenearly 300 kg cereals per head, 115 kg more than we do and their average calorie and protein intake is higher.

Why has India's average consumption declined to such a low level despite rising average income? Since India and Chinahave seen high growth rates, observers as disparate as Paul Krugman and George Bush (wrongly) explained the 2008global food price rise in terms of fast-rising cereal demand in these countries. They were quite right to expect risingdemand in India but quite wrong to think it had actually happened. The fall, which has taken place over the last decade,pushing India below Africa and the least developed countries, is not normal for a country with rising average income, andhas resulted from the lopsided, inequitable nature of growth.

Krugman et aldid not take account of the adverse changes in income distribution, owing to severely income deflatingfiscal policies advised by the Bretton Woods Institutions and faithfully implemented by successive Indian governmentsafter 1991, which sent agriculture in particular into a depression from which it has still not recovered. Withunemployment rising, with the fruits of growth going to a tiny minority while the masses suffered income deflation, theeffects of dietary diversification by the rich have been swamped by an absolute decline in cereal intake for the majority.

National Sample Survey (NSS) data show for all except two States an absolute fall in average animal products intake aswell, along with falling direct cereal intake over the reforms period. No wonder average energy and protein intake haveboth fallen. People other than the rich are not diversifying diets; even the hungry are forced to cut back and are sufferingnutritional decline.

By 2008, the situation was even worse despite good output. A record 31.5 million tonnes of food grains were exportedplus added to stocks, reducing domestic cereal supply steeply to 156 kg per head. This happened because the globalrecession impacted to raise unemployment and food prices spiralled to lower real incomes, so that there was a fresh round

of loss of purchasing power.

What is to be done? Bold measures are required, not the timid and reluctant half-measures we see. The Mahatma GandhiNational Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) needs to be seriously implemented to raise purchasingpower and extended to urban areas that have seen a steep rise in poverty. For example, in Delhi State the percentage ofpersons not able to afford 2100 calories per day rose from 35 to 57 between 1993-4 and 2004-5 and the situation by nowis definitely worse. MGNREGS can be used as well for a crash programme of building storage facilities for food grainsnow rotting in the open.

Food distribution through the PDS should be universal, freed from targeting, from the shackles of arbitrary and incorrectofficial poverty estimates. The recent decision to do away with targeting only in some districts will help very little. Thegovernment wishes to restrict the food subsidy but fails to realise that a version of the paradox of thrift operates here aswell the more it tries to reduce subsidy by restricting access, the more the subsidy will rise uselessly to finance holdingunsold food stocks as now.

This country can afford to feed all its people at a decent level what is holding it back is not lack of resources butignorant and incorrect ideas. Will the economists at the highest levels of policymaking abjure dogmas and think theproblem through rationally? Or will they inflict more punishment on the people, subjecting this country to the shame offalling even further behind the least developed countries and Africa?

2- PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMDwaipayan Bhattacharyya, Kumar Rana

In development literature the PDS is acknowledged as a mechanism of welfare states forcatering to the needs of the underprivileged. The efficacy of the PDS depends on thestates intentions and abilities to provide food subsidies, and the administrations abilitiesto deliver. Public distribution, therefore, is a product of both political will and economicexigencies. Some argue that economic aspects of such welfare measures do not only

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involve the realm of necessities, but also of political liberty in a democracy where majorityare poor [Sen 1999].

Those viewing development as a discourse produced by global capitalism, howevertends to consider the PDS and other modes of welfare as instruments for the third worldstate to legitimise its rule [Escobar 1995; erguson 1999]. Whether as an instrument forenhancing capabilities, or for legitimising a certain form of dominance, the PDS stands asa key institution with enormous politico-economic significance.PDS Over the YearsIn India, the PDS has evolved through various stages since the colonial times.1 It startedas war-time rationing in 1939 in Bombay and was extended eventually to several othercities. It was also taken to rural areas to meet situations of food shortage. In 1947 it wasterminated, and in 1950 was reintroduced as part of the planning process. As the countrywas facing severe shortage of crop production, the system had to rely on imports.

In 1964, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was set up, which worked as the sole centraagency under the department of food and civil supplies, in the ministry of food, fostorage, transport and distribution of food supplies. Since then, FCI has been doing themajor procurement, though the state cooperative marketing federations also procuredfoodgrains and supplied to the FCI. The state governments purchase the commoditiesfrom FCI for internal distribution and for supply to the fair-price shops (FPS). At the statelevel, the civil supplies department supervises over the supply offices at the district andblock levels and the FPS. Six essentials items supplied through the PDS are rice, wheatsugar, edible oils, kerosene and coal. Other items such as pulses, salt, tea are providedoccasionally.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, the PDS in India became increasingly robust with theaccumulation of buffer stock following rapid growth for some crops in some areas.2 Fromthe early 1990s, however, certain policy shifts occurred following which the PDs pricesprogressively moved toward the crop prices in the open market. Peoples dependence onthe open market increased. In 1997 the government introduced the Targeted PublicDistribution System (TPDS). The government reckoned that if food was provided atlower prices for the poor then the administration would be able to minimise capture ofsuch benefits by the elite. Moreover, sections of the government were worried since early1990s about large sums being spent for subsidising food in the country. The pressure wasfor reducing fiscal deficit, as part of the structural adjustment of the economy in crisis.Some not only questioned the rationale behind such subsidies, they also argued that thecost of public transfer was very high, with only a small part of the amount spent actuallyreaching the poor. As late as in 2003-04, it was estimated that for every rupee transferredto the poor, the government spent Rs 3.65 as budgetary foodsubsidies[Government of India 2005:xi]. Moreover, there wasalso an argument that the demand forsubsidised food was on decline with the general rise in income of the rural poor. This wassupplemented by another argument that India in the early 1990s was self-sufficient infood, requiring no more food imports for subsidised distribution.

PDS to TPDSAs the TPDS was designed to use food-subsidies more specifically for the poor, the stategovernments were expected to identify the population below the poverty line (BPL) sothat every BPL family could be offered certain quantity of foodgrain at specially subsidisedrates. In fact, the price for the BPL was set at half the economic cost, which the APLpopulation was expected to pay. Besides, while foodgrain available for the BPL familieswas fixed (initially 10 kilograms, revised to 20 kilograms from April 2000), no such fixedquantity was assigned for the APL population. So the declared goal of the TPDS was to

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ensure food-subsidy for the poor, guarantee regular supply, cut down on wastage andleakages, and exclude the undeserving section of the population from the governmentslargesse.

The Programme Evaluation Organisation (PEO) of the central government listed a numberof recommendations made to the states when TPDS was introduced [Government of India2005:4-6]. States were asked to make credible financial and administrative arrangementsto ensure supply of foodgrains to FPS. While the original BPL list was derived from theestimates of the Planning Commission for 1993-94, the gram panchayats and gram sabhaswere expected to help in formulating revised lists. The BPL population consists of thelandless agricultural workers, marginal farmers, rural artisans, craftsmen and urban slum-dwellers. The central governments commitment was restricted to ensuring 20 kilogramsper BPL family, quantities required for various central government employment schemes,and those required for transitory allocation (for the APL population). The states weresupposed to bear the cost of any additional requirement. Moreover, the states were told tocancel bogus cards, and issue photo-identity cards like in Tamil Nadu. The PEO alsomentioned a number of monitoring instruments that were suggested earlier for the FPS atthe district and block levels. The collector was asked to keep a record of actual offtakefrom the FPS, especially by the BPL section. The states departmentalsecretary was told tocarry out monthly monitoring of these figures before sending them to the centragovernment. It was the aggregate of such offtake figures, and not the state governmentslifting from the FCI, that made the consumption figure of the state. The shops wereinstructed to put out a display showing clearly the number of BPL and APL cardholdersmonthly allocation, previous months issue quantity, issue prices, and the address forreporting grievances. Administrative monitoring apart, social audit of the PDS system wasalso recommended at the shop, block and district levels involving the panchayat or themunicipal bodies. Clearly, an elaborate mechanism was set in place for minimisingleakages and reaching the genuinely poor. The states were entrusted with considerableresponsibilities for running the system.

Criticism of TPDSThe TPDS came under severe criticism especially from the left scholars. Ever since thedismantling of universal Public Distribution System of grains in 1997, observed ShaktKak, the government has implemented policies which are inimical to food security [Kak2007]. Madhura Swaminathan went a step further: Targeting food supply in PDS to anarrow section of the population is a dangerous policy, and a prelude to closing down PDSaltogether [Swaminathan 2000]. Anjini Kochar has shown that although the value ofmonthly wheat subsidy per BPL family shot up by a whopping 586 per cent between 1993and 2000, BPL caloric intake increased only marginally between 1993 and 1997, from1.933 calories to 1.964. Kochars survey also reveals that the introduction of TPDS hasadversely affected the offtake of the poor households relative to what it would have undera universal system [Kochar 2005]. Challenging figures supplied by the PlanningCommission, Utsa Patnaik argues that the effective demand of foodgrains especially inrural India has declined drastically in the era of economic reforms. She, therefore

demands that access to affordable foodgrains be restored through reverting to auniversal, not targeted public distribution system [Patnaik 2005].

The reasons for preferring universal to targeted PDS are many.At the practical level, the poverty line and the corresponding list of people below the linegenerate huge political controversy. Political influence is widely believed to play a key rolein inclusion and exclusion. The section of the population close to the line could actually beplaced on both sides, which makes denial of subsidy to the APL as a whole ethically wrongAlso, the poverty line is set so low that those who are even legitimately above are nothing

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but dismally poor. Moreover, the method to determine poverty is controversial and thepeople concerned have practically no role in such determination carried out in most casesthrough bureaucratic mechanisms.3 In West Bengal, for instance, it is argued that eventhe institutions of local governance were bypassed in determining poverty [Rana 2007].

Subsidies: Exaggerated? The switchover from comprehensive PDS to TPDS occurred at a time when thegovernment at the centre was keen to reduce food subsidy. The Economic Surveyof 1992-93 had stated, while the public distribution system has to be continued to help the poor,the burden of subsidy in the central budget has also to be restrained. In the samedocument it is suggested that a phased withdrawal in food subsidies by targeting PDSwould help in controlling inflation.

The reality of food subsidy, however, is very different. The subsidy bill has not gone above 1 per cent of Indias gross domestic productAccording to the Economic Survey (2006-07), the food subsidy bill as per cent of grossdomestic product declined from 0.91 per cent in 2003-04 to .083 per cent in 2004-05 andto .066 per cent in 2005-06 [Kak 2007]. In short, food subsidies constitute only a tiny partof governments total annual expenditure.

3- The NREGS is restricted. The PDS is targeted. Only exploitation is universal.

P Sainath

The rotting of lakhs of tonnes of foodgrain in open yards, while shocking, is hardly new or surprising. Remember the ruralpoor marching on godowns in Andhra Pradesh in 2001 in similar circumstances? The Supreme Court was quite right injolting the Union government. In a country where admittedly people are starving, it is a crime to waste even a singlegrain, said the annoyed Court. And suggested that the grain be released to those who deserve it.

Strong and welcome words. However, the Court could take matters much further if it sees why the Government of Indiawould rather have that grain rot than let the hungry eat it. The failure to understand that leads us to pit poor against poor.To see people in the APL category as the enemies of those who are BPL. Hence the suggestion that we take away grain

from one to give it to the other. APL was itself a fiction created by the government to reduce the number of poor it wasobliged to help. So the GoI would act selectively on this part of the Court's advice with glee. This would exclude those inAPL from even the pathetic little aid they get.

It will ignore the more important order of the Court to distribute the grain before it rots. It might pull up Food Corporationof India officers unable to look after the grain but who did not cause it to pile up in the first place. When you have twicethe grain you are equipped to stock, you have a problem. The GoI could distribute that grain. Or release it at low pricesthrough the public distribution system. It would hate either option. That would run against the grain of its ideology andeconomics. Letting the hungry eat it would, for the government, increase the subsidy burden. Why would thegovernment do that after successfully slashing Rs. 450 crore from food subsidy in the current budget?

Two arguments mark the opposition to a universal system (whether in the PDS or other sectors like health). One, there isno money. Two, we do not have enough grain for a universal system.

The nation has spawned 49 dollar billionaires and about a 100,000 dollar millionaires in a decade. But it has no money tofeed its hungry. So says a government that tosses Rs.500,000 crore of tax exemptions to the wealthy in the current budgetunder just three heads.

Not producing enough grain? Well, we spent two decades shifting countless lakhs of farmers from growing food to raisingcash crops. That shift involved greater input costs, higher debt and more. We sowed risk and harvested hunger.

The impact on foodgrain? The average daily net per capita availability of foodgrain between 2005 and 2008 is a dismal436 grams per Indian. That's less than it was half a century ago. In 1955-58, it was 440 grams. Take pulses separately andthe fall is 50 per cent. Around 35 grams in 2005-08 from nearly 70 grams in 1955-58.

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This hasn't stopped governments from claiming record production every other year. Remember the record surplusesin 2001-03? Those years we exported millions of tonnes of grain at prices lower than those offered to our own deprived.That grain fed European cattle the most food-secure creatures on earth. While hundreds of millions went hungry athome. Today's rotting grain, too, will at some point be flogged off to private traders at throwaway rates.

These last two decades also saw the collapse of public investment in agriculture. To starve farming of funds and say wehaven't enough grain is a travesty. Actually, commit yourself to universalisation, revive food crop, give the farmer a goodprice and boost the dismal levels of procurement that now exist. You'd be surprised how fast you can meet that challengeof production.

Instead, we seem to be heading, courtesy the National Advisory Council (NAC), for a universal system in 150 districts.Universal here could mean rice or wheat at Rs. 3 a kg to a limit of 35 kg per household. This universal stops at riceand wheat, will not include pulses, oils and millets, does not see the size of a household and is limited to a fourth of thecountry. You can't, goes the saying, be a little bit pregnant. You can't be a little bit universal either. The debate betweentargeting which is what the 150-districts notion is and a universal PDS is not one over different routes to the samegoal. It is one over different goals. You are either universal, or you are not. This move invites chaos.

First, as an editorial (August 10) in this newspaper pointed out, this seems to equate hunger with geography. What ofmillions in other districts? Are they not hungry? And how, for instance, would this impact on millions of poor migrantlabourers?

Take Orissa's Ganjam district which sends out four lakh migrant workers to Surat alone in Gujarat. Now Ganjam couldwell be in the 150 districts. How will its hungry migrants access that grain in Surat? Surely, Surat will not be in the list of150? Can't you just see the store keeper in Surat telling the migrant: Yes, son, I've seen the law, too. Here's your rice at

Rs. 3.

Meanwhile, even as these migrants fail to access their Rs. 3 a kilo grain, Ganjam could well be dropped from the list of150 at some point citing poor demand. Thane in Maharashtra with its famished adivasis, could well be a Rs.3-a-kilodistrict. Next door is Mumbai where rice goes at Rs.30 to Rs.40 a kilo. Result? Most of Thane's cheap rice will migrate toMumbai.

Or take agricultural labourers in Orissa. An adult needs at least 750 grams of rice a day. So a family of five (includingchildren) needs around 3 kg of rice a day. Let's say they cannot manage more than 2.75 kg a day. They would stillconsume 82.5 kilos a month. The new universal would give them 35 kg of that for Rs.105. The remaining 47.5 kg, atRs. 22 a kilo or more, would cost them well over Rs.1000. Where will they get that from?

Why do lakhs migrate each year from Kalahandi or Bolangir seeking work outside when the NREGS exists in those

districts? Why do so many prefer the lesser pay of brick kilns in Andhra Pradesh? One major reason is that the NREGSrestricts them to 100 days per household. In the awful brick kilns of Andhra Pradesh, every member of a five-strongfamily (including children) can get work for up to 180-200 days. The NREGS is restricted. The PDS is targeted. Onlyexploitation is universal.

Yet the debate has been over things like whether each family should have 25 or 35 kg. This is an Oliver Twist approach tofood security. Please, sir, I want some more. Coming from within the NAC, that wrongly casts Montek Ahluwalia of thePlanning Commission in the role of Bumble, or Pranab Mukherjee as Fagin. In truth, the two make Bumble and Faginseem reckless philanthropists. But there's a bigger problem to what's going on. It happens with each sector. The sequenceis the same.

The good guys create a demand for legislation. The government agrees. Next, the well-intentioned come up with a draftthe government then dilutes. After which the Planning Commission declares the effort to still be unworkable. So it'sthinned down again. Then the Finance Ministry says: where's the money? And it's watered down to an irrelevance

What remains is something that enshrines the right of the Indian people to cross the street (when the green signal that sayswalk' is on).

Obviously it fails badly in practice. Targeting always does. That's when Bumble, Fagin, The Artful Dodger and the rest ofthe Dickensian crew come up with what will be their solution to every such problem: smart cards, unique identificationnumbers, food stamps, vouchers and cash transfers. (And GM foods to meet production targets.) That's where it's headed towards a worse disaster.

The food security legislation in the form that now seems likely weakens and dilutes the Directive Principles of StatePolicy of the Indian Constitution. Those are universal, not targeted. Sure, we have to move towards making them real. But

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we need at every stage to ask whether the steps we take strengthen or weaken the Directive Principles. These steps onfood security weaken them. Also when we act in isolation in one sector like food, we undermine the vital others. What wecould do with is a comprehensive universal programme that covers nutrition, work, health and education. At one time, forone nation.

Trivialising Food SecurityEPW April 17, 2010

What, at a minimum, should the proposed National Food Security Act encompass?

It was an election promise of the Congress Party. Then, when the Congress-led UnitedProgressive Alliance came back to power, it was part of its 100-day agenda. Prime MinisterManmohan Singh even declared, Not a single Indian will be allowed to go hungry. Yet, theEmpowered Group of Ministers (EGM) entrusted with the task of getting the governments acttogether on food security more than merely treated the subject as unimportant, of utterinconsequence, prompting Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi, who has a more down-to-earth understanding of the political process, to intervene in order to restore its significance. Ifone were to go by EGMs frame of the draft National Food Security (NFS) Act, 2010, frankly, itmight best be seen as a design of how notto end malnutrition and hunger. The principal concernseems not to ensure food security to all and therefore to ensure a nutritional minimum, but tocontain the governments expenditure under the proposed NFS Act. After all, meeting thedemands of the fiscal deficit is more important than putting in place universal rights to as basic a

requirement as food. The draft bill as drawn up by the EGM denies the notion of universal rights,keeps entitlement to as little as 25 kg a month and even seeks to vary the issue price! Thecontinuing debate within government and outside about how many poor there are in India hascome in handy for the cost-cutters. But food security means a right to food and rights cannotbe targeted, they have to be universal. Therefore, the only meaningful legislation on foodsecurity is one that covers the entire population. Independent estimates of a universal schemeunder which every household would be entitled to 35 kg of cereals every month are that it willcost an additional Rs 25,000 crore over the current annual expenditure of Rs 55,000 crore on thepublic distribution system (PDS), or less than 0.5% of Indias gross domestic product asincremental expenditure. Should the government then even think of denying the right to food oncost considerations?

More important, food security is not merely a question of energy requirements; adequatenutrition is also at its core. It is here that the tragedy of India unfolds. Indeed, serious doubtsarise as to the very decency of Indian society. First, take the figures of underweight children or ofthe proportion of infants with low birth weight (or, indeed, of maternal mortality attributable tomother malnutrition by demographers) of the National Family Health Surveys of 1991-92, 1998-99 and 2005-06. Then, go beyond the national averages which are bad enough, even incomparison with parts of sub-Saharan Africa to the poorer states, say Jharkhand and Orissa,and within them, to some of the poorer districts, like Palamau or Kalahandi, and then further tothe marginalised communities there, say the Bhuyias or the Musahars in Palamau to find outwhat and how much they eat. As a society, we are truly obscene.

India effectively began dismantling the PDS in 1997 when it sowed the pernicious divisionbetween below-the-poverty-line (BPL) and above-the-poverty-line (APL) households. Whateverlittle integrity was there in the PDS was thereby consigned to the bin. The votaries of targetingclaim to have empowered the BPL households, but, plainly speaking, via this ruinous division,they have done exactly the opposite. Given the prices at which PDS commodities are sold to APLhouseholds, they no longer have any stake in maintaining the integrity of the system. However,whatever little good has come over the last decade is, in no small measure, the result of thepublic interest litigation initiated in April 2001 by the Rajasthan unit of the Peoples Union for

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Civil Liberties (PUCL) with its writ petition to the Supreme Court and its competent handling bythe Human Rights Law Network. One has only to look at the courts direction in respect of cookedmid-day meals in primary schools or in relation to the Integrated Child Development Servicesscheme calling for the setting up of functional anganwadis (childcare centres) in all habitationsand now, its intervention regarding the PDS in the form of the Wadhwa Committee Report.

What then, at a minimum, should a food security law encompass? The EGMs draft bill, which, thankfully, Sonia Gandhhas now rejected, besides lowering the prevailing entitlement ofBPL households from 35 kg to 25 kg per month, did notaddress any of the nutritional needs of the majority of the Indian people that we hinted at above. Indeed, it did not take

account, in any manner, of the letter and spirit of the Supreme Courts order in the PUCLs right to food case. It did noteven occur to the EGM that pulses and cooking oil, at the least, are included in the PDS commodity basket. Indeedreportedly, it was in favour of replacing entitlements of food with cash coupons, this, even as the poor have been/arewithstanding the worst of the rampant food inflation with the government doing precious little to control it. What a foodsecurity act needs, at the minimum, are entitlements that free everyone from hunger and malnutrition, which would meanmeeting the basic needs of all through universal coverage. Why do we say this? One only has to look at the determinantsof malnutrition to realise that the right to food, if it is to be won, has to be linked with the right to work, the right to healththe right to education, and the whole set of other economic and social rights in the Directive Principles of State Policy inthe Constitution. The EGM has only trivialised the content of the draft NFS Act.

Amartya Sen favours universal PDS

Press Trust of India / New Delhi August 8, 2009, 15:58 IST

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen today favoured a universal public distribution system, instead of the present targeted one, and called foran effective mechanism for the "equitable" supply of foodgrains to the needy.

"I think there is a lot of merit in the event of a (universal) public distribution system...On the other hand, the targetted (PDS) is open toneglect," Sen said.

Sen was referring to fears of leakage through the targetted PDS and stressed that the target should be to ensure an equitable supply offoodgrains to the people.

At present, the Centre provides foodgrains at cheaper rates through ration shops only to select segments of the population, such as thepoorest of the poor (AAY category), the poor (BPL segment) and people above the poverty line (APL), apart from supplying for somewelfare schemes.

Sen was speaking at a function here organised by the Right to Food Campaign.

Noted economist Jean Dreze, also speaking at the event, termed the government's proposed Food Security Act a "repackaging" of theexisting system.

The government needs to have a three-pronged strategy of social assistance, proper nutrition for children and universal PDS beforecoming up with a comprehensive food security Act, Dreze said.

The Manmohan Singh-led UPA government has said it would formulate a National Food Security Act whereby every family below thepoverty line would get 25 kg of rice or wheat every month at Rs 3 a kg.

Dreze is spearheading the Right to Food campaign which has demanded that five kg of dal at Rs 20 a kg and half-a-kilo of edible oil atRs 35 a kg be supplied to each family in the poorest of the poor category each month.

Apart from special norms for children and widening of the PDS, the Campaign seeks suitable provisions for pensions for the old andhigher maternity allowances.

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