The cabinet has reportedly cleared the Food Security Bill for introduction in the winter session of Parliament. With this, another round of spirited, but often vitupirative debates has started. For a country that has the largest proportion of malnourished children, the tenor of the opposition is startling, and in case sympotomatic, a scary reflection of middle class sensitivities of the day.
Let us look at some of the objections to the Act.
1. It is too expensive, and we cant afford it.
This is the oft-repeated argument, that the Bill is fiscally ruinous and there is no way it can be afforded. And what is the estimated cost to the fisc? Well, depending on who is doing the maths, it ranges from 30,000 crores to 1 lac crores. Lets take the upper boundary. And as a perspective, compare this against the subsidy on oil (estimated to be touching 60000 crores this year), or indeed, taxes foregone on account of exemptions (mind you, distortionary exemptions, not tax rate rationalisaitons) add up to 6-7 times that number.
Are sops to the middle class of India and vested corporate interests (which is what most exemptions are for) more critical than ensuring a healthier new generation?
2. PDS is too inefficient, and cant be trusted to deliver
An old chestnut, but continuing as a red herring! PDS has been historically inefficient, but has made rapid progress in recent years. Driven by states like Tamil Nadu and Chattisgarh, and bolstered by measures like RTI and innovations in technology, PDS wastages have been reduced drastically. Not just in the exemplar states mentioned above, but almost across the board. The Centre's showpiece UID project is a prime variable to be used to increasae efficiencies even further! The Food Security Bill should be used as an opportunity to carry out more innovations in delivery, not throw up hands in depair!
3. Cash transfers and food stamps are more "efficient" options
Somewhat similar to arguments made in support of "fortified biscuits" in lieu of hot meals in the mid day meal programme for school kids. Cash transfers are a great idea, but not for solving the issue of access. Food security addresses issues of both affordibility AND access.
4. It will be beyond India's means in terms of availability terms
The biggest non sequitor that is peddled about. The total requirement, and in these programmes (just as in NREGA), actuals always come out lower than estimates as larger sections of the populace migrate to superior foods (and superior jobs). The estimated foodgrain procurement for the Food Security bill is 60 million tons, that is exactly the ballpark number being procured today. Without even accouting for a natural growth in procurements that has been over the trend growth in agriculture itself.
At a basic level, it is fundamentally about what sort of country do we want to build. Will we as a society agree to a stunted growth of our new generation? Or will we do all that we can (and some more, if required) to reverse that trend. At the cost, if necessary, of a few less exemptions on real estate projects masquerading as SEZs.
I am reading the bill. So far it reads well.
ReplyDeletehttp://nac.nic.in/foodsecurity/nfsb_final.pdf
I remain worried about the implementation of this. This bill is making promises on a very large scale. That section on the rights of starving persons, is going to be extremely difficult to implement - especially as the exact drivers of starvation in the national economy have not been clearly identified. I suspect that will need more legislation in the near future.
I feel some of these aims set out in the bill could become more tractable if a famine intelligence unit is setup in the National Food Commission and if the state governments form famine response groups/committees to respond to alerts from the famine intelligence units. This could substantially improve the remedy for microfamines which seem to pop up form time to time in so called well-to-do states like Maharashtra.
I think care also needs to be exercised to ensure that the nutritional requirement are adjusted to the age and medical condition of the recipients. The adverse effects of sudden dietary shifts on the starving and malnourished are well documented. There should be a medical component to this otherwise it will do more harm than good.
More when I read the bill in detail.
And boss, I honestly don't care about the "Middle Class Sensitivities" on this issue - 64 years after independence and we still have starvation and malnutrition of children - it is a national shame!!
One more thing I am not seeing a lot on in the bill but may be important in terms of implementation.
ReplyDeleteThere are supply chain management issues in the PDS. In getting from global commodity market to transmodal shipping node to FCI godown to PDS store - there are delay which lead to wastage. The delay imo result from imperfect intelligence on the needs of the PDS components.
I wish the bill would provoke a discussion on this issue because frankly a lot of major players in the commercial market have solutions for that sort of thing.
One possibility to help optimise this flow issue would be if one sets up an internal (to the PDS) commodity market - where the various FCI godowns advertise their wares on a server and the various PDS stores made bids on the material with some intelligence on the likelihood of being able to sell the product. Alternatively one could imagine such a scheme operating at the level of the transmodal shipment nodes which could advertise the presence of food material and then the various FCI godowns would make bids for the material based on their ability to move it down the road to the PDS stores.
This may require setting up of some kind of prediction mechanism that monitors sales from PDS stores and creates a trend analysis for the PDS store owner to base his/her bid for material. The same mechanism could be set up at the FCI godown level where the godown manager could generate a bid based on how much stock s/he has just moved to the PDS store owner.
I think such a system may also help with early warning on micro-famines, for example if a particular set of PDS stores starts to make bids above their trend analysis predictions, then there is likely trouble is brewing there.
Mav,
ReplyDeleteI would actually rather have the universal coverage model than the "targeted" system that a lot of the official crowd is advocating. There is far too much "fear" of fiscal doom in universalisation. But as the NREGA experience shows, prosperity is already self selecting people out of the ambit. Patterns of consumption, for example of wheat deep to the south of the Vindhyas, show that increasing numbers of people are migrating to superior foods.
About FCI, I would actually go the full hog and question the raison de etre of the entity. As of today, it is nothing but a foodgrain logistics provider to GOI. Hence, why should be have a monopoly? GOI should simply get a bid from the utility that can procure, store and transport the grains from point A to point B at the lowest cost. Even unbundle the business - procurement and storage can be awarded separately to transport.
Hello Somnath,
ReplyDeleteI don't know which is better the targeted system or the universal coverage model. The bureaucrats prefer the targeted system because it is easier to control. Also universal coverage projects like the Aadhar number scheme have run into a lot of criticism for not reaching out to the lowest levels of society.
The current pattern of meat consumption in India is shifting. Among the poorest of the poor, the easiest source of protein is rats, squirrels, dogs, rabbits, crows and other small animals. It may be possible to shift this to vegetable/soy based protein via the PDS and that may actually reduce the ecological pressures on small animal populations.
I worry that sudden changes to the FCI monopoly would create its own set of problems. I want to see FCI modified on the inside to behave in a more efficient fashion. If this is successful, I think we could make a transition at some later date to a more open system.
BTW - even more than a "middle class" sensitivity issue - there is a very deeply set rural v/s urban divide here. Rural poor have very different problems than the urban poor. Given the mediocre state of news media coverage of the poor in India, our only real window into this world is from vernacular cinema.