33% exclusion in PDS draws concern

The proposed Food Security Bill and the government’s ‘Plan B’ for it is likely to tilt foodgrain allocation in favour of richer states.

Civil society groups and Right to Food activists and economists like Jean Dreze have raised alarm at the risk involved in the provision for uniform exclusion rates for all states, part of Plan B for the Food Security Bill. According to the plan, while all above-poverty-line and below-poverty-line (BPL) families would be clubbed together and entitled to five kgs of foodgrain per person per month, the number of people excluded would be the same for all states, irrespective of poverty lines.

Speaking to Business Standard, Dreze had said, “The purpose of Plan B was simply to point out it is futile and unnecessary to create separate priority and general categories even after excluding 25 per cent of the rural population and 50 per cent of the urban population. It was neither an endorsement of these exclusion ratios, nor a recommendation about what entitlements people should have. The government seems set to make a mess of this simple suggestion by combining it with ‘uniform exclusion’, that is, a uniform exclusion ratio of 33 per cent, not only across states but also across rural and urban areas. This would be very unfair to the poorer states, and defeat the purpose of the Bill.” He termed the proposed ‘uniform exclusion’ formula “abominable”.

The government’s version of Plan B was a watered-down version of the original plan. Today, foodgrain allocation under the BPL quota involves a fairness principle---poor states get more (per capita). Switching to a uniform exclusion system would favour rich states, at the expense of poor ones. Compared to a continuation of the current formula for inter-state allocations under the BPL quota, uniform exclusion would mean much larger shares for Punjab, Haryana, Kerala, etc, and lower shares for Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.