Light Theesko :Sleeping on empty stomach- Some food for thought

At a time when India is going gaga over its assumption of G20 presidency, the Supreme Court has opportunely pinched the Centre by drawing attention to what is glaring in the country’s backyard. “Nobody should go to sleep empty stomach”. “It is our culture to ensure nobody goes to sleep empty stomach, the Supreme Court said on Tuesday, while asking the Union government to see to it that food grains under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) reach the last man.

New Delhi, which during its G20 presidency will chair over 200 meetings that aim to secure global economic growth and prosperity, cannot afford to be blind to the galling fact that the fruits of India’s growth post Independence have not trickled down to the marginalized sections of its population as envisaged by the founding fathers of the Constitution.

Together, the G20 members represent more than 80% of the world’s GDP, 75% of international trade and 60% of the world’s population.”Our guests will get full experience of India’s amazing diversity, inclusive traditions, and cultural richness. We wish that all of you will participate in this unique celebration in India, the Mother of Democracy’. Together, we will make the G20 a catalyst for global change,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared emphatically after India formally assumed G20 presidency.

On the home front, Modi cannot wish away the fact that the country’s population, which gallops on auto-pilot, has also multiplied manifold the number of beneficiaries covered under the NFSA after the 2011 census.Given the vice-like grip of vested interests, middlemen and systemic aberrations, unaccounted numbers of eligible and needy beneficiaries are unconscionably deprived of the benefit under the law due to lax enforcement. The proclaimed increase in per capita income of people in recent years is not mirrored by India’s standing in the Global Hunger Index.

Carping at what goes into the GHI can help India tone down or obfuscate global opprobrium, but it cannot satisfactorily explain why 81.35 crore beneficiaries under NFSA do not get their due.  At least 14 states have unabashedly filed affidavits stating their quota of food grains has been exhausted.

The Centre’s claim that per capita income in India has increased in real terms by 33.4 per cent since the enactment of NFSA in 2013 does not necessarily mean that a large number of households have scaled to the higher income group. Hence, the Supreme Court previously asked the Centre to ensure that the benefits of the NFSA are not limited by the 2011 census figures. While upholding the ‘Right to Food’ as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution, the apex court wanted more of the obviously needy people (most of them migrant workers who are not tracked, much less registered on eShram) to be covered under the Act.  

The main objective of NFSA is to provide for food and nutritional security by ensuring access to adequate quantity of quality food at affordable prices to people to enable them to live with dignity. The Act provides for coverage of up to 75 per cent of the rural population and 50 per cent of the urban population for receiving subsidized food grains under the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS).

Due to widely differing perspectives, every definition of terms such as ‘poor’, ‘poverty’, ‘poverty line’ or ‘bread line’, ‘food security’, et al leaves much to be desired. At the global level, the most widely held and understood definition of absolute poverty measures poverty purely in economic terms: earning less than $ 2.15 a day. Lack of money is just one aspect of poverty. A holistic approach to define poverty requires attention to a multiplicity of factors that vary widely across nations and geographies.

No two thinking minds can agree on who exactly is poor in India. Calorie intake, once an acceptable yardstick, presented challenges of converting 2,400 calories a day into a monetary value and raised questions about the need to limit calories to 2,400 in the first place. Calories apart, people need affordable and easy access to other amenities like housing, clothing, education and so on.The World Bank uses the concept of income per day, which is now taken at $1.90 (say Rs 160 a day in India). What it can buy for an individual is again linked to relative values of currencies. So, $ 1.90 may not help one get a burger in the US, but it will suffice for a thali in a small restaurant in India.

The Union government, while tom-tomming its anti-poverty measures, unwittingly leaks sensitive data. For instance, Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY) is supposed to cover 800 million people. This number also includes the 136 million families covered under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) schemes.

Wanna talk about rural poverty? Following data leak, it was highlighted that 110 million farmers were registered and drew the minimum income support of Rs 6,000 per annum.
Some global experts have suggested that India should take a fresh look at its poverty line. The time has come for India to raise its poverty line from the existing extreme poverty line of $1.90 per person per day to the lower-middle income (LMI) poverty line of $3.20 — a level some 68 per cent higher. Per capita GDP growth in India averaged 3.5 % per annum for 20 years — from 1983 to 2003. It was in 2004 that the official poverty line was raised by 18 per cent.

Now, that India, as G20 president, has a chance to rehearse its role as Vishwa Guru, its Sherpas and NITI Aayog eggheads must evolve sound methodologies and parameters to clearly identify, define, and measure various aspects of poverty so that the nation can evolve an index that others can willingly adopt as one that removes the perceived bias of Western or other affluent nations in current globally benchmarked rankings, including the questionable (from a desi perspective!) GHI.