Sonia Gandhi's pals turn critics on the Food Security Bill

The UPA’s flawed Food Security Bill is now under attack from its most ardent supporters - for varied reasons.

One campaign is led by Right To Food (RTF), an umbrella grouping of non-governmental organisations that include people like Aruna Roy, who is on Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council (NAC), and Jean Dreze, an economist and former member of NAC.

The other campaign is led by economists and academics including Abhijit Banerjee of MIT, Pranab Bardhan of the University of California, Berkeley, Ashok Kotwal of the University of British Columbia, and Bharat Ramaswami of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), among others. This group’s position was published by the Hindustan Times of Wednesday.

Abhijit Banerjee is co-author with Esther Duflo of Poor Economics, a book on the worldwide experience with anti-poverty programmes that work and those that don’t. So what he says, should count. (To read our own objections to the Food Security Bill, read here )

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Neither campaign, however, is likely to please the UPA’s bosses, since the thrust of their arguments is that the scheme is poorly conceived, and will not deliver the right results. The significance of these arguments lie in the fact that they are being made by people who don’t question the UPA’s good intentions in piloting food security.

The arguments common to both groups are these:

One, the Food Security Bill (FSB) tries to artificially break the population into three groups - priority targets, who will get deeply subsidised grain at Rs 3, Rs 2 and Re 1 for rice, wheat and coarse grains; general category targets, who will get lower entitlements at half the procurement price; and those who will be excluded.

Both the groups believe that universalisation should be the norm because it is not easy to determine who is poor. One can exclude the rich on certain criteria, but how do you determine who is poor? Trying to do so will make the scheme unworkable, and may end up excluding those who need food the most.

[caption id=“attachment_228917” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The economists and academics would prefer to achieve universalisation by reducing the subsidies to the ultra poor and raising them for the general category who may or may not be poor. Munir uz Zaman/AFP”]  [/caption]

The RTF group told the standing committee of parliament that is currently scrutinising the bill that “given the extent of hunger, malnutrition and poverty in the country, it is impossible to target benefits to a few, without large exclusion errors”, reports BusinessLine.

The economists and academics group agrees. “Even with the best intentions it’s very hard to determine who is really very poor, and who is merely poor, especially since incomes fluctuate and someone who looks less poor today may become derelict tomorrow.” Its solution: “It’s much easier to imagine being able to identify the one, significantly wealthier, excluded category.”

Two, both groups attack the highly centralised nature of the current FSB. The RTF group says that the decision-making process in the Bill is “highly centralised”, with panchayats, local bodies and even state governments getting almost no role in its creation.

The other group agrees that there is great scope for diversity in approaches. In the Hindustan Times article, the group says: “We believe that the Bill should allow greater flexibility to state governments, as long as they stay within the resource limits specified by the central government. Each state must be left free to carry out the public distribution system (PDS) reform as it sees fit. Some states may want to change to cash transfers; others may opt to continue with transfers in kind, or go to something intermediate, such as food stamps. In the present form, it’s not clear if a state wishes to try, say, cash transfers, it would be able to do so.”

But there may be areas where the two groups disagree.

For example, the RTF group believes that the FSB tries to do too little. It essentially limits the ambit of food security to “distribution of foodgrains” and that too to “token entitlements for certain groups such as children, people living in starvation and migrants.” Its solution of universalisation would be to expand the scheme to a much larger degree.

The economists and academics would prefer to achieve universalisation by reducing the subsidies to the ultra poor and raising them for the general category who may or may not be poor. They ask: “Why not just have two categories: the included and the excluded, and treat all included groups equally? Simple arithmetic shows that in terms of grain the per capita subsidy will go (down) from 7 kg per capita to 5 kg per capita for those who get classified in the ‘priority sector’ and from 3 kg per capita to 5 kg per capita in the general sector and there will be money left over for providing some support for those in the Antyodaya (poorest of the poor) programmes.”

The RTF group also makes a very important suggestion that goes more to the heart of the matter: food security cannot be reduced to one centralised organisation (the Food Corp) procuring food from the granary states of India and distributing them all over. Its definition of food security is more comprehensive, and focuses on all aspects of the problem - especially growing food locally and distributing it to nearby areas. This would make it logistically more sensible than buying all the food in Punjab and Haryana and moving it to Dibrugarh and Kanyakumari.

The group says the FSB “must simultaneously address production, decentralised procurement and storage and distribution related issues”.

In short, the bill must address the Triple A problems of “availability, accessibility and absorption.”

As against their Triple A demand, the votaries of food security may give the current Food Security Bill a C-minus.

Little wonder, many states, and non-Congress political parties, have decided to oppose the FSB tooth-and-nail.

Will the UPA government and Sonia Gandhi listen? If one assumes that the main purpose of the bill is to get the Congress re-elected in 2014 so that Rahul baba can have a shot at the prime ministership, ideas like decentralisation, differentiation and building food security from the ground up will be less than politically useful. It will allow others parties and players to claim credit for food security. And it will take time.

Most of the criticism may thus fall on deaf ears.