Govt schemes are helping perpetuate food insecurity

The UPA government is set to bring in the National Food Security Act (NFSA) with the stated objective of providing food security to all.

The enactment is likely to ensure, as President Pratibha Patil stated in her address to the joint session of Parliament on June 6, 2009, that every family below the poverty line (BPL) in rural as well as urban areas gets 25 kg of rice or wheat (or 35 kg if Sonia Gandhi’s advice prevails ultimately) per month at Rs 3 per kg. This legislation will also be used to bring about a ‘broader systemic reform in the public distribution system’.

But will this much hyped enactment really help achieve its goal of food security to all?

A credible answer can be found in the steps the government is initiating; not in what it is stating.

While the government asserts that food security to all is its utmost concern, its actions do not match this objective; it is seriously engaged in determining the number of poor in order to limit whatever little it wants to pass on through the NFSA.

There is no dearth of economists in the country who can use sophisticated statistical models and tools, which are of course not intelligible to the millions of poor and hungry for whose benefit the exercise is undertaken, to come out with the numbers that satiate the government’s desire, if not to mitigate the hunger of the actual sufferers.

Maybe the figures given by different committees differ from one another. That, however, doesn’t pose any threat, but, an opportunity to the government to choose the option best suited to it. Currently, there is a debate on three sets of data produced by three different committees —- Tendulkar committee, Saxena committee and the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS).

The second of the above, a committee appointed under the chairmanship of NC Saxena by the rural development ministry, found that as high as 50% of the rural people were living below poverty line since they were not able to spend enough money to procure food to give 2400 calories in rural areas and 2100 calories in urban areas (the criterion long used to identify the BPL population).

The committee asserts that a per capita income of Rs 1,000 per month in urban areas and Rs 700 in rural areas is needed to buy the food to give those many calories. This is higher than the Planning Commission’s existing estimate of Rs 539 and Rs 369 in urban and rural areas respectively.

The NCEUS, on the other hand, finds that as high as 77% of the people in India were living on less than Rs 20 per day. More worrisome, 87.8% of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, 85% of all Muslims and 77.9% other backward caste population are living below the poverty line as per this criterion.

Equally disturbing is the finding that, most of the people from “poor” and “vulnerable” sections are not employable —- 86% of India’s illiterate belong to these groups as also 78.6% of people with education only up to the primary level. As a result, most of these people earn their living as informal workers with no security of jobs, wages, health or insurance against vulnerabilities.

The Suresh Tendulkar Committee’s report, the most palatable of all to the government circles, put the overall BPL figure at 37.2% with 41.8% rural and 25.7% urban poverty.

The admirers of the committee say the estimates have increased the poverty figures by about 10%, which means more number of people would benefit from the schemes targeted at the poor and the committee has included nutrition, health and education expenditure, too, in its method instead of the existing practice of confining the poverty estimates based only on food intake in terms of minimum calorie intake.

But they have conveniently forgotten to notice the reduction of calorie levels from 2400 (rural) and 2100 (urban) to a uniform 1800 level by the committee. One of the justifications shown to this reduced level is the norm recently set by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). And again, what is concealed is that the FAO suggested this 1800 calorie norm as a minimum dietary energy requirement (MDER) for light or sedentary activity, but, not that applicable to the manual workers in rural and urban India.

The claims of the superiority of this committee’s methodology and the criticism on it apart, what translates into money terms of its poverty threshold, after the inclusions and exclusions, is an expenditure of Rs 446.68 per person per month in rural areas and Rs 578.80 in urban areas.

The lay people, who can’t understand the complex methodologies of the economists, do know, however, that their figures are underestimates.