Govt tears up NAC's Food Bill; time to send it packing?

Reality is catching up with Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council (NAC). Having spent the last few years scripting loads of spending programmes without worrying about who’s going to foot the bill, it is now facing the prospect of the government using the scissors liberally on its Food Security Bill (FSB), not to speak of the flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).

On Tuesday, The Economic Times told us that NREGA may be informally restricted to the offpeak season since it was distorting farm wages too much. The paper said the rural development ministry had “informally” asked states to “defer” the scheme during “sowing, transplantation and harvesting” seasons.

On Wednesday, the Hindustan Times announced that the government was reducing the entitlements and excessive rhetoric of NAC’s version of the Food Security Bill (FSB). Among other things, the watered down FSB reduces the food entitlements of above-poverty line families to 3 kg a month (against NAC’s 4 kg). Reason: the government does not relilsh the prospect of spending over Rs 1,00,000 crore on food subsidies, when it is already shelling out Rs 70,000 crore for it.

The government also wants to blue pencil NAC’s proposals to guarantee food support from cradle to grave, special entitlements for single-women households, special “therapeutic” foods for children, and emergency food relief for disaster-affected persons for one year after a disaster.

The newspaper quotes Harsh Mander, convenor of NAC’s food security group, as saying. “It’s a caricature of the notion of the right to food. The government will be missing a great opportunity if it goes ahead with this draft.”

Somebody should tell Mander that you can’t pander endlessly to pet political projects at someone else’s cost. The issue is not about feeding the poor. That ought to be done. But it can’t be done by civil society activists who do not have the mandate to find the resources for it. The government has to find the resources, and it has to cut the coat according to the cloth.

The problem with the NAC is that it has been completely irresponsible in its recommendations, even if it is assumed that it has a heart of gold. Worse, the NAC is busy trying to create all kinds of additional layers of bureaucracy - precisely the kind that Anna Hazare has been asking for in the Jan Lokpal Bill and for which he has been duly excoriated.

NAC wants a huge bureaucracy to administer its anti-communal violence bill and another one to monitor its Food Security Bill, apart from expanding the bureaucracy for monitoring NREGA and strengthening the decrepit public distribution system. In short, it is asking for nothing less than a parallel government to administer its pet schemes. One wonders whether the underlying purpose of these _jholawalas_is to create sinecures for out-of-work do-gooders or to tackle the country’s problems with ingenuity and competence.

[caption id=“attachment_44722” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“NAC chairperson Sonia Gandhi. Courtesy PIB”] [/caption]

NAC is trying to legislate an entitlement-based society in every sphere - from education to work to food and some more areas - when the purpose of government is to enable people to do things for themselves. Food, education and work are important building blocks for a just society, but they can’t be delivered just by legislation.

This is typical of the way we have tackled important social issues in the past. If you can’t tackle terror, have special laws for it. If too many men are beating up their wives, have a special provision for it. If people are aborting female fetuses, ban it. Ban. Legislate. But never Execute. This is the mantra of politicians and babus. All legislation creates new bureaucracy, and new opportunities for corruption. Never mind, we will have a new legislation for corruption as well. Now we can collect money in the name of fighting corruption to complete the circle.

NAC has got the whole idea of food security wrong. Just as energy security is not about giving everyone free cooking gas and petrol, food security is not about giving people free food. It is about expanding supplies with appropriate policy inputs and enabling people to earn enough to buy it. One subsidises only those who are absolutely in need, and that too for the limited time when they are really helpless.

Similarly, the right to education cannot be guaranteed by legislation, but by creating more schools and higher educational institutions at affordable costs. It needs enabling policies to train more teachers, build cheaper classrooms, and increase investments in education by everyone - including companies. It is not about allowing everyone to feed on the udders of a nanny state.

In other words, the right to food or education is not about feeding the poor (except in the short term) or pushing them into overcrowded schools, but about creating the right policy environment for building those capacities in the economy. Even more important, these rights should not result in feeding and expanding the same corrupt bureaucracy and administration that has perpetuated long-term poverty in the first place.

The same jholawalas who rail against corruption and the lack of governance, and cite these as reasons for the rise of violent Naxalism, recommend more of the same to tackle the problems of poverty and ignorance. If a deadening bureaucracy and crass politics has got us into this mess, how will the same medicine give us a better cure for poverty?

The fundamental error of NAC is its focus on pushing up demand for food and social services instead of working on the supply side. Legislating the right to food or education (or housing next?) is only going to result in inflation unless the supply side is activated. The latter depends on good policies and excellent implementation - on which NAC seems to be bereft of ideas.

Ultimately, it does matter how many half-baked schemes you launch, but whether you have made even one of them work 100 percent efficiently. Let’s take NREGA. It’s a great scheme, and it puts money in the hands of the poor. If NAC had ensured that every rupee spent on NREGA actually went to the poor, it would make sense to expand the scheme and even make it inflation-proof.

But if it worked, there would be no need for a costly Food Security Bill, since people would be able to buy what they need themselves. You need either money or food, not both - at least in terms of entitlements.

Just look at the economic damage wrought by the NAC’s suggestions. First, NREGA raises wages (which is good since it redistributes incomes from rich to poor), pushing up food costs. Then it recommends a costly Food Security Bill, which will raise food prices further and faster, pushing up costs once again. Without continuous and ever-escalating minimum support prices for farmers, this effort to insulate the poor on both sides (income and expenses) is simply not workable. Little wonder, farmers rattled by rising costs are actually saying they won’t grow food (they are declaring a “crop holiday”) if they have to do so at a loss.

Apart from recommending excessive spending right and left, the NAC has not come up with one good idea that would make for sensible policies to improve the supply of food or education or whatever. This is what happens when unemployed busybodies are given political patronage for such long periods of time.

NAC should have had a limited mandate. When you have a permanent NAC, it will be busy hatching crackpot schemes to keep itself employed once the initial logic for its existence is over. This is what is going wrong with NAC.

Sonia_ji_, maybe you should just give these people Rajya Sabha tickets so that they don’t keep fretting about what to do with their lives and ruining the country’s governance further.