Gaps within the Public Distribution System (PDS) should be bridged and the Food Security Bill amended to ensure that everyone gets enough food, civil rights activist Binayak Sen has said.
Dr. Sen was delivering the Fifth Annual K.C. John Memorial Lecture on the subject ‘Are the poor getting poorer,’ which marked the opening of the Kovalam Literary Festival, at the Kanakakunnu Palace here on Saturday.
On hunger
Dr. Sen attacked the government policies “that privilege the rich and powerful and, by implication, harm the poor and disenfranchised.” He cited figures that indicated high infant mortality rates in the country. Large sections of the population had a Body Mass Index of less than 18.5, “indicative of chronic energy deficit, that is hunger,” he said.
“Famine is not an event marked by the death of the victim,” and the basic failure in its understanding was “an inability to recognise the political, social and economic determinants that mark the onset of the process,” he said.
Disturbing statistics revealed by health surveys coexisted with a reality that there was “an abundance of stored food in the godowns of power,” Dr. Sen said, emphasising the need to move away from a centralised system of food storage and distribution. A community-based food storage and distribution system needed to be prioritised, he said.
Food Security Bill
On the Food Security Bill, he said that once it became an Act, the existing PDS would be adversely impacted, turn more complex, and be liable to misuse. The Bill should be modified in a manner that ensures “that everyone can have enough food, not just cereals, not just wheat and rice, but food – including pulses and oil.”
The lecture was followed by Dr. Sen’s wife and academic Ilina Sen’s talk that focussed on ‘Food Sovereignty.’ She said the current policies did not take into consideration the skills of the rural population, especially that of women in regions such as Chhattisgarh.
