Worries persist about the real commitment of the new central government to implementing the food security law passed in the twilight months of the last government. The out-going government missed a rare chance to demonstrate the imagination and compassion that the leadership in Brazil displayed to successfully end hunger in that highly unequal land. It passed a landmark law, which legally binds the Indian government to provision of very cheap grain to two-thirds of the country’s households, school meals to all children in government schools, universal infant feeding and near-universal maternity entitlements. But it left the actual implementation of this law to the government that succeeded it.
Contrary to initial fears, the new government has not officially abandoned or curtailed the food law. But the timelines of the law continue to be violated, and most states have still not even drawn up lists of households who will receive the highly subsidised grain. The scheme for universal maternity benefits for all pregnant and nursing mothers has still not been prepared, let alone rolled out on the ground.
The deeper problem is that middle-class India, like in much of the world, remains largely hostile to the idea of welfare. They are convinced that it is only the rising tide of economic growth that will help overcome poverty. Therefore the best contribution that governments can make is to facilitate private investment, while reducing government footprints of public spending and regulation. They reject the alternate view that, even with growth, those disadvantaged require substantial direct interventions of governments, for redistribution, protection, and state provisioning of food, education, health-care and social security.
Successive governments in India since the 1990s have placed central faith in private markets as the major vehicle for battling poverty. However, at the same time, a combination of democratic politics, judicial activism and civic mobilisation have prevented the full dismantling of its welfare infrastructure. Instead India has seen even its strengthening and backing by statute, especially during the last decade. India thereby struck a middle-ground by simultaneously pursuing two paths — of welfare and economic growth — probably inevitable in a democracy with such high reservoirs of impoverishment and hunger.
The new government is even more emphatically and avowedly business-friendly. It has already begun dismantling labour protections, and initiated writing down reforms in the compulsory land acquisition laws, to enable big business to both discharge labour and involuntarily acquire farmers’ lands more freely. But its policy to welfare and socio-economic rights — such as to food, work and education — remains uncertain and worrying.
There are many things that governments can – and some believe must - do to prevent hunger and malnutrition. These include growing enough food by sustainable technologies, promoting assured and decent work for all adults, ensuring clean water, sanitation and health care for all persons, and advancing greater economic, social and gender equality. In addition, there is also a strong but by no means universally held view that the state must provision food to those who are food and nutritionally vulnerable.
State provisioning of food in India began in the mid-1960s which were years marked by successive crop failures, drought and very low agricultural productivity, and looming memories of colonial-era famines. Policy-makers universalised an existing public distribution system established in colonial India to ensure cheap food to select cities to mitigate poverty and food insecurity; this was restricted to persons identified to be poor in the 1990s. States piloted and expanded young child feeding centres since the 1970s, as well as school meals. Pensions for the aged began only in the mid-90s.
However, until the turn of this century, these programmes were modest in scale, uneven in coverage and uncertainly linked to budgetary availability. But this changed after the PUCL petition filed in the Supreme Court in 2001 in the context of overflowing official warehouses of rotting grain and large-scale hunger and even starvation, demanded the legal right to food of all persons. The Supreme Court held that the fundamental right to life was also a positive human right assuring every person all that is required for a life with dignity. This includes importantly the right to food. India’s highest court therefore converted the range of food provisioning and social protection programmes into legal entitlements, expanded and universalised these, and established an independent system of its Commissioners for the enforcement of these entitlements.
This culminated in the passage of the food security law in the autumn of 2013, which became a moment of intense national debate both inside and outside Parliament, about whether indeed the state should provision food at all as a component of its duties for social protection. Public opinion in India still remains deeply divided about the merits of this law which legally mandates public food provisioning.
Many indeed are profoundly dismayed by the law. Their unease stems from the high costs of the food law, which they fear will inflate deficits and fuel inflation, therefore they believe that the measure is profligate and populist. They feel that the law forces the state to transfer unproductive subsidies to the poor. A related cluster of criticisms of the food security law is that it is not implementable and the investment therefore wasteful, because state administrations demonstrably lack the capacity to actually deliver the promises of the law, evidenced by even official studies which confirm enormous leakages of subsidised PDS grains into the black market. They fear it will create dependencies, and will dis-incentivise work.
The supporters of the law are contrarily concerned that the law does not go far enough: it is not universal, it neglects agriculture, it does not include provisions for the starving and destitute, and it ignores cohering dimensions of food and nutritional security, such as water, sanitation and health care. It also fails to establish a robust and independent enforcement mechanism critical for the implementation of any rights-based law.
Still they cautiously view it even as a potentially historic statute because for the first time legal duties on the state are in place which guarantee large populations assured and affordable access to food. They suggest that there is considerable scope for taxing the rich to ensure necessary investments in the nutrition, health and education of the working poor, as India’s tax to GDP ratio is lower than most industrialised market economies, and India gives large subsidies and tax waivers to big business and the middle classes. The experience of states as diverse as Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu demonstrates that, given political will, the leaky and creaky PDS can be credibly fixed. There is no evidence that people work less if their stomachs are full; on the contrary, nourished workers are surely more productive. They also argue for the moral case for food provisioning in the context of the enormous avoidable human suffering imposed by hunger.
As these debates simmer, hunger in India persists on a scale unmatched in any other part of the planet. Public action and public conviction must compel every government, in Delhi and state capitals, to respect and realise the right to food, and to end the enormous human suffering associated with unassuaged hunger.
