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Thursday, December 22, 2011

Food Security Bill

After few stints with my travel diary, I am back with one of my favorite topics, Politics. The government has introduced the food security bill in Parliament today along with the burden of Rs 1,00,000 crores of burden on the Finance Minister. Surrounded by corruption scandals and lack of political reforms, the government needed something to talk about in the upcoming state elections in UP, Gujarat and Punjab, 3 of the most important elections in the current political scenario. The food security bill is the brainchild of the National Advisory Council headed by Sonia Gandhi. After NREGA, this is the second biggest social security policy advised by the council. If the bill is passed, then it will feed rice/wheat/millet to almost 65% of the Indian population at a subsidized rate of Rs 1/2/3 based on different levels of poverty. Personally I appreciate the government for bringing in such a bill which hopes to wipe out the malnutrition and starvation across the country. However, the government once again proved that how ineffective and inefficient in planning such a important bill. There are issues of corruption, infrastructure, supply issues and on top of it is the global economic scenario. 

Before implementing the bill, it is important to identify the people who are considered as living below poverty line and above poverty line. We as such do not have a consensus on how to define the poverty line. Should it be based on the money a family earns per day or should it be based on the nutrition level they consume. Once identified, I am not sure how effective the distribution will be. With the history of high level corruption every where, it is important that the government should ensure that the amount of money allocated towards the programme is reaches fully to the public. Rahul Gandhi himself have acknowledged that most of the money allotted for the welfare schemes does not reach the public. The government do not have any mechanism to check corruption and with a weak Lokpal Bill it is planning to introduce, I am not very confident that the government will be able to achieve the target of feeding all the Indians. 

The public distribution system itself is a failure in most of the states with lots of grains intended for the public is smuggled and sold else where. Apart from this, statistics says that almost 40% of the agricultural products produced in India is being wasted because of poor infrastructure.Most of us have seen how wheat grains were stored in open and allowed to rot in Punjab due to lack of storage space. There are not enough proper warehouses to store the procured grains. Moreover, the quality of the food products is identified based on the number of days it takes to reach the retailers from farmers. The more the days travelled, the less the quality and I am sure with the kind of roads and infrastructure we have it will take more time to reach the retailer.Ultimately government will be left with low quality food grains to be distributed to the poor. 

India is land of billion people and to feed them requires enormous supply. Currently, Southern states, Punjab and Haryana have been producing surplus and feeding almost the entire nation. Taking in to account of the unpredictable nature of monsoons in India, we do not know when will we be hit by water problems and with lots of disputes on water down South, we do not know how are we going to get the supply for the entire nation. India seldom enter the international markets to procure food grains and if the necessity comes for India to procure from the International Market, it is going to definitely inflate the already high food inflation. I am sure government would have thought about it before introducing this bill, but I am sure this is not the right time to introduce the bill in the Parliament. The economy has slowed down in India and in 2012, if the euro zone crisis worsens, it will have a major impact in Indian economy as well. I feel government should wait till we come back to 9% growth levels before introducing this bill in the Parliament. We have already seen farmers protesting against the government on the MSP. In fact farmers in Andhra Pradesh are planning to have a crop holiday as mark of protest against the government. When the government is not able address the issue of those who are feeding the nation, what is the point in the introducing the bill. 

Indian government has taken a short cut way to come back to power. Being dormant for 3 years with elections are around the corner all of a sudden the government seems to bring in all the populist measures without having any major discussion in the parliament. Personally I have lost the confidence on these politicians but there are still people whom I can bank on to see my country a developed one.



2 comments:

Ajay Kumar said...

Rightly said. Wrong time to bring in the bill. The govt has to remember that NREGA is a complete disaster in many places if not most places.

Food distribution is with the state govt and the center taking it up in this manner is quite a poor idea and i would not be surprised if this messes up with the existing PDS system in some states.

Javahar said...

Indeed, Indian government need to establish cold storage.
The tedious process of distinguishing the below poverty line people varies with respective to time, which could not be categorized by case study. After all, its just a make up call for the forthcoming elections to fool the people and grab their votes without Bribing.
Its not a food security bill, inherently its Congress Election Security Bill.