Taking lessons from the vote-gathering power of a
poverty-fighting initiative like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA),
the Congress party promised a National Food Security Act in its manifesto for
the 2009 general elections. Following the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)’s
huge victory at the hustings, the president of India set the seal on the
Congress party’s poll promise in her first address to a post-election joint
session of Parliament on June 4, 2009. Just as the NREGA was enacted against the
backdrop of a prolonged civil society campaign, the promise of a Food Security
Act has in its background an even more protracted civil society campaign going
back to 2001 when a writ petition on the right to food filed in the Supreme
Court (PUCL vs Union of India & Ors) became a rallying point in the Right
to Food Campaign.
(The Right to Food Campaign is a network of individuals,
organisations and campaigns committed to work for the realisation of the
people’s right to food. It was initially an offshoot of the Supreme Court
litigation on the right to food but today the campaign exists much beyond it.
This platform has a more or less nationwide presence and has resulted in the
building of several state campaigns and thematic campaigns. For further details
see www.righttofoodindia.org.)
Even though the Congress party pledged to enact a right to food
law that would guarantee access to sufficient food for all people, it has
constricted its vision to a very narrow focus: merely 25 kg of grain per month
at Rs three per kg for families in the BPL list and subsidised community
kitchens for the homeless and migrants in all cities. But even in its limited
form this poll promise threw out a challenge to civil society i.e. how to exert
pressure for the enactment of a comprehensive Right to Food Act rather than a
token National Food Security Act.
Through various orders passed over the last eight years, the
Supreme Court has already secured right to food entitlements for the people,
especially the poor and the vulnerable, far wider in scope than the act promised
so far by the UPA-II government. The challenge is to enhance these entitlements
under the act, not to roll them back to a token dole.
The Supreme Court’s orders universalised the entitlements of
central government schemes for children under six (through the Anganwadis) and
those studying up to Class VIII (through the Midday Meals Scheme). By ordering
that hot cooked nutritious food be served to children and that self-help groups
be involved in the preparation of take-home rations to be provided for children
under three years and for pregnant and lactating mothers, the Supreme Court
stopped corporate interests and private contractors from providing packaged
food.
The Supreme Court also enlarged the number of people who would
be given cheap food at Below Poverty Line (BPL) rates under the Public
Distribution System (PDS), maintaining the number of eligible people at 36 per
cent of the population even though Planning Commission estimates showed a
reduction of eight per cent in the poverty ratio. Similarly, it greatly expanded
the scope of the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), intended for the poorest of the
poor, by extending it to include six priority groups as a matter of right and
ordering that all of them be given 35 kg of grain each month at Rs two/kg for
wheat and Rs three/kg for rice. It also attempted to address the issue of
leakages in the PDS by setting up the Justice Wadhwa Committee which is looking
into the reforms needed in the PDS.
Since social security for the marginalised and the vulnerable
requires both food and money, the Supreme Court also put in place entitlements
to various pension schemes such as the National Old Age Pension Scheme and the
National Maternity Benefit Scheme.
Last but not least, the Supreme Court put into place systems of
accountability and redressal by making the district collector and the chief
secretary accountable for the implementation of these schemes and appointed
independent Supreme Court commissioners to monitor them, along with their
advisers in different states. The apex court’s orders also empowered the gram
sabha to conduct social audits of all these schemes and held the chief
secretary responsible for any hunger deaths.
While these were landmark orders in terms of making government
accountable for implementing the right to food of the poor and the vulnerable,
an important limitation of these orders lay in the fact that except for
children’s schemes (Midday Meals and Integrated Child Development Services –
ICDS), the entitlements are not universal. For instance, PDS and pension
benefits are restricted to BPL families. Similarly, the Supreme Court did not
raise PDS entitlements in keeping with the nutritional requirements, for
instance, by including pulses and oils. All this left a large part of the hunger
situation unaddressed.
However, it is important to add here that although the
Government of India currently provides cheap food under the PDS and AAY to only
6.52 crore households (about 32.6 crore people), various state governments have
through their own subsidies been extending the PDS to reach many more people –
about 11 crore households, or 55 crore persons. Some states like Chhattisgarh
provide 35 kg of cheap rice (at Rs two/kg for BPL households and Rs one/kg for
AAY households) to more than 70 per cent of the population under the PDS and
states like Tamil Nadu provide the entire population with rice at Rs two/kg up
to 20 kg per household.
It is clear that the Government of India’s suppressed poverty
figures did not tally with the state governments’ own assessments. Yet there is
no single answer to the question of how many poor people actually exist in this
country. Different committees and reports at different points in time have
arrived at different figures. For instance, in 2005 the National Commission for
Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, chaired by Dr Arjun Sengupta, pointed out
that more than 77 per cent of the people live on less than Rs 20 per day. The NC
Saxena Committee set up by the ministry of rural development puts the figure at
50 per cent of the population. Most recently, the interim report by the former
chairperson of the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council, Suresh Tendulkar,
puts the number of poor in India at 38 per cent of the population, based on
nutritional and other social indicators. The Planning Commission places the
poverty line at 28.5 per cent.
According to India’s chief statistician, Dr Pronab Sen (Economic
& Political Weekly, 2005), "the current value of the poverty line does not
permit the poverty-line class to consume the calorific norm and the periodic
price corrections that have been carried out to update the poverty lines are
inadequate and indeed may be even inappropriate. Consequently, the poverty
estimates made in the years after 1973-74 understate the true incidence of
poverty in the country."
The unreliability of all these estimates, the inherent problems
involved in identifying the poor and the divisive nature of targeting are some
reasons why the Right to Food Campaign has consistently advocated universal food
entitlements under the PDS as well as universalisation of other schemes such as
the ICDS and the Midday Meals Scheme.
When the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) approached
the Supreme Court in 2001, the prevailing situation was one of hunger amidst
plenty. The food stocks in the Food Corporation of India stood at 40 million
metric tonnes of grain and grew further to 70 million metric tonnes by 2002.
However, it is important to add here that between 2002 and 2004 the Government
of India under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) exported more than
28 million metric tonnes of grain (much of it as cattle fodder) at prices below
the BPL rates. The export of cereals was banned after the UPA came to power in
2004 but subversion of the law is a routine occurrence. This issue was also
presented in the Supreme Court although this did not lead to any specific
orders.
It is well known that in the last decade food production has not
kept pace with the requirements of the population. On the contrary, it has
dropped and thereby affected the availability of foodgrain. In the course of
this public interest litigation over the past eight years the issue of food
production and denial of the right of farmers to grow food due to various
mining, agricultural and trade policies has not however been brought before the
court. It would also be pertinent to state here that no discussion on
eliminating hunger and implementing the right to food is possible today without
addressing the issue of state support to small and marginal farmers, fish
workers and forest dwellers.
When the government announced that it would formulate a National
Food Security Act, various groups under the banner of the Right to Food Campaign
began a series of national and state-level consultations on legislating for the
right to food, which resulted in the formulation of a set of "essential demands"
for the Right to Food Act.
The preamble to the essential demands recognises freedom from
hunger and malnutrition as a fundamental right of all people residing in India
and emphasises a policy of food sufficiency through sustainable agriculture with
a special focus on rain-fed areas. It opposes the forcible diversion of land and
water from food crops to cash crops or for industrial use and advocates systems
of minimum support price, price stabilisation, effective grain movement and
storage, and strict regulation of speculation and trade. Ensuring the right to
food requires economic access to food, adequate employment and wage levels,
protection of existing livelihoods, equitable rights over land, water and forest
and overcoming the barriers of gender, caste, disability, stigma, age, etc. The
realisation of the right to food also requires a system of direct food
entitlements through public provisioning with affirmative action in favour of
marginalised groups and making the government accountable at all levels to
ensure that no man, woman or child sleeps hungry or is malnourished.
Some of the demands laid out in this document are already
justiciable under Supreme Court orders in the right to food case, such as the
entitlements for children, from the womb until they are 14 years of age, or for
priority groups under the AAY. However, going beyond this, the campaign seeks to
guarantee entitlements for all those who have been excluded from existing
schemes, such as out-of-school children, migrant workers, homeless persons and
people living with debilitating illnesses. In addition to creating an obligation
on government to prevent and address chronic starvation, the law must protect
the right to food of persons who have been internally displaced due to man-made
or natural disasters.
Also among the essential demands of the Right to Food Campaign
is that women must be regarded as heads of the household in all food-related
matters such as the distribution of ration cards and that a serious endeavour be
made to eliminate all discrimination against the scheduled castes, scheduled
tribes, minorities and other backward castes. The campaign also demands the
establishment of independent inbuilt institutions of accountability along with
provisions for time bound grievance redressal, including criminal proceedings
and penalties for violation of the entitlements; the introduction of safeguards
against invasive corporate interests, genetically modified foods and private
contractors; and an embargo on all laws and policies that adversely impact an
enabling environment for implementation of the right to food.
If the right to food litigation in the Supreme Court brought the
situation of children and the vulnerable centre stage and strengthened reforms
in that direction, this time around the PDS is likely to be the pivotal issue in
food entitlements under the forthcoming act. The Right to Food Campaign demands
a radically transformed, universal Public Distribution System. Asked about his
views on "targeting versus universalisation" of the PDS during a press
conference on the Right to Food Act in August, noted economist Prof Amartya Sen
said that there were strong arguments in favour of universalisation. For
instance, a universal system is less divisive and helps to create a strong
public demand for quality services. A targeted system on the other hand always
involves exclusion errors.
The Right to Food Campaign envisions a Public Distribution
System that involves local procurement of food in order to reduce transport
costs and includes the distribution of nutritious grains, pulses and oil on a
per unit basis according to the required nutritional norms. If this is agreed
upon then the PDS will be the link between public provisioning and the provision
of proper remunerative support to the small and marginal food-producing farmers.
In a country like India where hunger and malnutrition have
reached alarming proportions, worse than even sub-Saharan Africa, a Right to
Food Act along the lines suggested by the campaign and an amendment to the
Constitution making the right to food a fundamental right will show the way
forward. This act is especially timely today as the country is going through a
severe drought, with more than 250 districts being declared drought-stricken and
food prices skyrocketing, making it impossible for large sections of the
population to meet minimum nutritional requirements.