India bears a disproportionate share of the world’s hunger and under-nutrition burden which is claimed to be unfavourable even in comparison to sub-Saharan Africa. It is a known fact that majority of the Indians suffer from protein, calorie inadequacy and micronutrient deficiency, which have debilitating consequences for health and wellbeing throughout life and inter-generationally.
Surprisingly enough, barely 30 per cent of children have both protein and calorie adequacy and almost half the children are underweight.
While a developing nation like India where massive investments are seen happening in sectors like power, industrialisation and other development activities, the similar ventures in areas like health and nutritional status remain quite neglected. It is believed that investments in reducing hunger and meeting basic food needs will surely have greatest immediate and long term impact.
The role of Public Distribution System (PDS) is crucial in the context of widespread hunger and malnutrition in the country. It is high time that the PDS which is engulfed in massive corruption, poor performance and embezzlement needs to be considerably strengthened to ensure food security for all. The first step towards improving nutrition status is to ensure that people have access to sufficient food.
Related issues such as adequacy of food-grain production, agrarian and land use policies should be suitably reviewed in light of these food security objectives. Regrettably the country is heading towards a situation of food deficit because the overall food grain production has reportedly been stagnated. This has resulted in higher prices and unavailability of food grains affecting the most vulnerable groups. Besides adopting progressive agricultural policies and increase in investments in agriculture sector, the state also needs to create stronger protective mechanisms for the poor. Further the PDS should be expanded and strengthened to offer greater food protection to the poor.
In the recently concluded National Workshop on ‘Food Security through PDS – Prospects and Challenges’ it was pointed out that the current poverty line used by the Planning Commission to determine the poverty ratios is highly flawed. The poverty line should be suitably enhanced taking into consideration current prices of food-grains and expenditure on other essential items such as housing, education and health. The mega-event which was attended by union and state government food secretaries, several renowned NGOs from across the nation and several experts, including Dr N C Saxena Commissioner and Harsh Mander special commissioner of the Supreme Court, found that food entitlements need to be de-linked from other benefits extended to BPL families and ration cards should be solely for food entitlement card and not used for targeting for other schemes. The current system of identification of the poor based on the 13-point system is deeply flawed which results in both inclusion and exclusion errors with a large number of deserving poor being left out of the BPL net. The identification of BPL families should be based on social and economic categories and deprived communities as well. The Supreme Court has already defined certain social categories, which have to be covered under the Antodaya Anna Yojana (AAY). The most vulnerable groups such as widows, old people, disabled, people with stigmatised ailments, urban homeless, primitive tribal groups, destitute and other such excluded groups must be covered under the AAY. It was felt that all ration shops in the country should be de-privatised and handed over to panchayats, cooperative societies, existing grain banks and other public bodies. The Essential Commodities Act should be modified to ensure all offences under PDS should be made cognizable and non-bailable. Social audit of all ration shops be made statutory. Entire quota of grain should be made available to Fair Price Shops by the first week of every month.