Niti Aayog is looking to hire a technical consultant to evaluate the implementation of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) and LPG subsidy to ensure benefits are reaching eligible beneficiaries.
The government think tank’s Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO) has floated a tender to select a technical consultant for “Central Coordinating Agency for Evaluation of the National Food Security Act and LPG Subsidyâ€.
“The government implements one the largest public food and nutritional safety nets in the world through the National Food Security Act (NFSA), enacted in 2013.
“...However, despite the large public expenditure, gains in the food security and nutritional outcomes in India have been slow, with the country accounting for roughly 30 per cent of the global burden of hunger,†DMEO said in the RFP (request for proposal) document.
The National Food Security Act provides a legal mandate for the distribution of foodgrains at subsidised prices, cooked meals, take-home rations, and food security allowance through a network of schemes — namely the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS), Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), and Mid-Day-Meal (MDM) scheme.
The cost of implementing the food subsidy under TPDS was Rs 4,22,618.11 crore in 2021 (Revised Estimate). The cost of implementing MDM and ICDS was Rs 12,900 crore and Rs 17,252.21 crore (Revised Estimate), respectively.
According to the DMEO report, “More than 1/3rd of children less than 5 years are stunted (35.5 per cent, NFHS-V, 2019-20), one-quarter of adolescents aged 10-14 years have low body-mass-index (BMI) for their age (24 per cent, CNNS, 2016-18), and more than half of all women aged 15-59 years and 15-19 years are anaemic (57 per cent and 59.1 per cent, NFHS-V, 2019-20)â€.
Elaborating on the rationale behind the evaluation of the LPG subsidy, DMEO further said that India is the third largest energy consumer in the world after China and the US.
“The current consumption of LPG in India has risen to 12.3 per cent of total petroleum products compared to 1.13 per cent of kerosene. The ongoing schemes will potentially increase the usage of LPG further, thus, making their evaluation imperative,†it added.
DMEO also said the demand for oil and gas has been burgeoning over the years with rising population, economic growth, and concomitant demand for cleaner energy.
To meet future energy demands, a market-determined price mechanism (MDPM) was introduced through price deregulation, which allowed the refineries to stipulate refinery gate prices of petroleum products that would compete with prices of imported products, it added.
DMEO pointed out that the LPG subsidy not only reflects the policy makers’ cognizance of the need to augment the transition from traditional cooking fuel, such as firewood and dung cake to cleaner cooking fuels but also to provide them to a majority of the underserved population — mostly from rural areas and economically weaker sections — at subsidised rates.
