Monday, March 18, 2013

For Feeding Mouths Aplenty

While India continues to reel under The Effect of rising food Prices & Increasing hunger, The Proposed National Food Security Act can be a Panacea. But with a narrow minded Focus & Select targets, The Upcoming Legislation might end up Nowhere & can worsen The Delivery of food grains to The Hungry.

John Van Hengel, born 1923 in Waupan, Wisconsin, was an ordinary man with all vices and sins – as per America’s Second Harvest, a company founded by Hengel himself. He undertook various occupations; from being an ad man to a beer truck driver in Hollywood, married a model, divorced her and underwent spinal surgery post a deadly fight. It was while working at a soup kitchen post his surgery when he met this mother of 10 and her dying husband. She survived by rummaging in food bins and was desperate for a place to both deposit food and check it out – like a bank. Hengel, hooked to the idea, persuaded a grocery store manager to donate surplus food. From a defunct church bakery selling more than 250,000 pounds of food to 36 charities in its first year, America’s Second Harvest was born in 1976, the world’s first Food Bank Chain. For a country like the US with around 20 million people belonging to households suffering from ‘very low food security’ (households where at least one person remains hungry during a year), food banks have been a revolution. But for India, where ITC pioneer Sam Pitroda recently unveiled his ambitious food bank scheme, the 250 million plus hungry population might prove too Herculean a task. The only light at the tunnel end is the National Food Security Bill, touted to hit harder at hunger than NREGA did at poverty. But a clichéd narrow focus and lack of holistic research-backed provisions endanger the entire system of fighting hunger in India.

Despite numerous measures and programmes – Targeted PDS, Mid-Day Meal Scheme, National Food for Work Programme, Antyodaya Anna Yojna and Integrated Child Development Scheme – the number of undernourished people increased from about 210 million in 1990-92 to 252 million in 2005-06. India houses around half the world’s undernourished children. Also, there has been a general decline in per capita calorie consumption in recent decades. Grain mountains and hungry millions continue to coexist. According to the Global Hunger Index 2009, India is ranked 65 among 84 developing countries – worse than nearly 25 Sub-Saharan African countries and all of South Asia, except Bangladesh. The reason – all government schemes have been victims of narrow minded targets, rampant corruption and perpetual battles between central and state government owned entities.

The Targeted Public Distribution Scheme (TDPS) was introduced in 1997 as a revised version of PDS, allegedly serving only the urban poor and being a miserable failure to effectively serve the poorer sections of the population. But even this has slowly bled from the entangled web of poor targeting, high administrative costs, and low effectiveness of the programme. The NFSA, if enacted, mandates the provision of a minimum of 25 kg of rice or wheat to Below Poverty Line (BPL) families per month at Rs.3 per kg. The TDPS targeted same at Rs.4.15 per kg for wheat and Rs.5.65 per kg for rice. But as you go into the depth of the meaning behind each word, the proposed legislation faces sure shot stumbling blocks with the debate regarding the definition of hunger and hungry and the number of BPL families.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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