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For Feeding Mouths Aplenty
While the nation continues to reel under the effect of rising food prices and increasing hunger and malnoutrition, the proposed National Food Security Act can prove to be a panacea. But with a narrow minded focus and very select targets, the upcoming legislation might end upnowhere and can even worsen the delivery of food grains to the hungry. by Anchal Gupta
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 John Van Hengel, born 1923 in Waupan, Wisconsin, as per President of America’s Second Harvest, a company founded by Hengel, was an ordinary man with all vices and sins. He did various occupations from being an ad man to a beer truck driver in Hollywood, married a model, divorcd her and underwent spinal surgery post a deadly fight. It was while working at a soup kitchen post his surgery when he met this mother of 10 and her dying husband. She survived by rummaging in food bins and was desperate for a place to both deposit food and check it out -- like a bank. Hengel, hooked to the idea, persuaded a grocery store manager, to donate surplus food. From a defunct church bakery selling more than 250,000 pounds of food to 36 charities in its first year, America’s Second Harvest was born in 1976, the world’s first Food Bank Chain. For a country with around 20 million people suffering from ‘very low food security’ (when atleast one person remains hungry during an year), food banks have been a revolution. For India, where ITC pioneer Sam Pitroda recently unveiled his ambitious food bank scheme, an over 250 million hungry population might prove too Herculean a task. The only light at the tunnel end is the National Food Security Bill, touted to hit harder at hunger than NREGA did at poverty. But, a narrow focus and lack of holistic research backed provisions endanger the entire system of fighting hunger in India.
Despite numerous measures and programmes - Targeted PDS, Mid-Day Meal Scheme, National Food for Work Programme, Antyodaya Anna Yojna and Integrated Child Development Scheme, the number of undernourished persons increased from about 210 million in 1990-92 to 252 million in 2005-06. India has about half the world’s under-nourished children. Also, there has been a general decline in per capita calorie consumption in recent decades. Grain mountains and hungry millions continue to co-exist. According to the Global Hunger Index 2009, India is ranked 65 among 84 developing countries — worse than nearly 25 Sub-Saharan African countries and all of South Asia, except Bangladesh. The reason – all government schemes have been victims of narrow minded targets, rampant corruption and perpetual battles between central and state government owned entities.
The Targeted Public Distribution Scheme (TDPS) was introduced in 1997 as a revised version of PDS, allegedly serving only the urban poor and being a miserable failure to serve effectively the poorer sections of the population. But even this has slowly bled from the entangled web of poor targeting, high administrative costs, and low effectiveness of the programme. The NFSA, if enacted, mandates the provision of a minimum of 25 kg of rice or wheat to Below Poverty Line (BPL) families per month at Rs.3 per kg. The TDPS targeted same at Rs.4.15 per kg for wheat and Rs.5.65 per kg for rice. But as you go into the depth of the meaning behind each word, the proposed laegislation faces sure shot stumbling blocks with the debate regarding the definition of hunger and hungry and the number of BPL families in India.
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 The Planning Commission’s estimate, coupled with the revised Tendulkar Committee estimates, do not reflect nutritional deprivation. Even if adequate, estimates based on sample survey cannot adequately form the basis for estimating entire population deprivations. There can be a number of reasons for intermittent and chronic hunger. In fact, according to Srijit Mishra, Associate Professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, “People not considered poor because of expenditure in non-food aspects may have food deprivations. People considered poor may not be food poor because of own production. People’s expenditure during the year of survey may be different in another year. Hence, a broader criteria for cut-off that are locally administered, flexible and with provisions for multiple interventions (such as ICDS for pregnant and lactating mothers, Mid-day-meal for school children and pension for vulnerable population - widow, aged and disabled) should be used.”
Similarly, the norm of fixing food requirement must be an independent scientific exercise and not linked to either a budget constraint or a food availability constraint which is precisely what has been done in the proposed norms. Cereal limit of 25 kg or even 35 kg is a very narrow measure and inadequate from a calorie norm. What is more, the bill provisions, as of now, are silent on protein, fat and other nutrient requirements. At the prevailing price of pulses, the current lot of BPL families fall out of the bracket with access to protein-rich foods. Similarly, deficiency of micro-nutrients such as iron, iodine, zinc, vitamin A and Vitamin B12 are scientifically subsets of chronic hunger which will persist unless malnourishment alleviation as a major objective is not included in the bill. On the production front, with a mercurial monsoon playing hide and seek in recent times coupled with the vagaries of climate change, the adequate production and distribution of the food grains on a consistent basis would be a stiff challenge.
In fact, civil society and the intellectual elite at large have launched a spirited campaign for revising the proposed provisions. Activists ranging from Aruna Roy and Jean Dreze (both members of National Advisory Council now) to scientist Devender Sharma and Kavita Srivastava have come together to demand massive changes to the proposed structure of the Bill. In fact, in an open letter to PM and the Planning Commission Deputy Chairman, they demanded some principle changes including an overarching obligation to protect everyone from hunger, promotion of sustainable and equitable food production ensuring adequate food availability in all locations at all times, protection against forcible diversion of land, water and forests from food production and protection of interests of small farmers, especially ensuring that farmers are given remunerative prices for food items. The distribution of subsidized food comes a distant seventh in the list of demands enlisted in the letter.
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