In this crucial time, e-PDS is the need of the hour to ensure food security among scores of migrant labourers
On the occasion of World Hunger Day, when Covid-19 is wreaking havoc and lakhs of people are starving in urban and rural India, the Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen’s theory of the economics of famine deserves a revisit. Sen’s pioneering research Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation on the Bengal famine of 1943 reveals that the major cause of the famine was not a sudden decline in food supply but from the inequalities built into the mechanism for distributing food. Around two to three million people had died of starvation in British India during the World War II. Nothing much has changed.
The Public Distribution System (PDS), the main pillar of India’s food subsidy reforms, is bootstrapped to ramshackle conditions. States like Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Bihar and Jharkhand remain doubly disadvantaged. Beneficiaries complain against the dearth and delay of foodgrain distribution in the national Capital. However, the Delhi Government has plans to provide kits with other kitchen essentials along with the rations.
As per the norms of the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 75 per cent of India’s rural population and 50 per cent of the urban population should be covered by the PDS. However, this is a distant dream and the mechanism is becoming more flimsy and dysfunctional each year. And at a time when millions are facing grave and immediate hunger, the Centre and States are passing the buck and playing a blame game.
Migrant labourers in all major cities are facing forced deprivation as they have been denied ration cards and matters have been made worse by the fact that they have lost their livelihoods due to the pandemic. Consequently, the mission of the PDS and food security are hanging in the balance.
Sen, Abhijit Banerjee and Raghuram Rajan have pitched for temporary ration cards to be issued for the time being but nothing seems to be moving in that direction. The bureaucratic machinery seems to have jammed. Consequently 5.5 per cent of India’s population living under the extreme poverty line with pervasive inequality and deep deprivation is battling with the pandemic on its own, on a hungry stomach.
To combat the crisis, which has caused a war-like situation, the Government announced a Rs 20 lakh crore special economic package. The Centre has approved the world’s largest food ration security benefit scheme. It has plans to distribute foodgrain worth Rs 46,000 crore to 80 crore people. The programme ‘one nation, one ration card’, to be operational by June 1, promises to be a boon for PDS beneficiaries as they will be able to access rations from any fair price shop in the nation.
However, at this juncture, the evolution, efforts and evaluation of food security in executing the PDS in various States have been requestioned. The problems with the PDS and abject poverty are adding to the woes of the marginalised when they are attempting to eke out a living in these troubled times.
At present, poverty, the PDS and the pandemic are areas of concern. According to sources, the stock of foodgrain with the Food Corporation of India (FCI) stood at 77.7 million tonnes as of last March. The FCI has assured the people and the Government that there would be no dearth of foodgrain to meet the required supply. To tackle the crisis, the Government has announced a Rs 1.7-lakh crore Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Package which would benefit 80 crore people under the NFSA. Thousands of beneficiaries are stocking up on foodgrain in advance for a maximum of two months. Moreover, the FCI is saddled with excess stocks of wheat and rice.
However, many have been left out of the purview of the PDS. The number is 14 per cent of the population in Bihar and 12 per cent in Uttar Pradesh. Shockingly, the food security law seems to be dysfunctional in the national Capital, too, as 13 million inhabitants have been deprived of basic amenities during this epidemic. In Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, where 31 Coronavirus deaths were reported, the food supply is dwindling. And this is India’s financial capital. The situation is worse in rural India.
Inequality is a denial of human rights and social justice. Oxfam’s inequality estimation indicates that the top 10 per cent of the Indian population holds 77 per cent of the total national wealth, which further detects the distortions in healthcare, education and social security measures. This is going to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. This pandemic calls for the reorientation of public and economic policies. In this crucial time, e-PDS is the need of the hour to realise food security among the scores of migrant labourers. Rajan, the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has rightly expressed: “You have to treat this pandemic as a situation that is unprecedented. We have to break norms in order to tackle what is needed.” The PDS needs to be the customised, keeping the poverty and the pandemic in mind.
(Biswal and Chakraborty are Assistant Professors at SIMC and SIBM respectively and are working at Symbiosis International, Pune)
