Cabinet to discuss food bill ordinance

The bill aims to give rights to 67% population over five kilos of food grains per individual per month at fixed price of Rs 1 to Rs 3 a kilo through ration shops

The union Cabinet is expected to take up the Food Security Bill (NFSB) and the possibility of an ordinance for discussion today. It would decide whether an ordinance should be passed or a special session of Parliament should be convened to pass the bill.

The bill aims to give legal rights to 67% of the population over a uniform quantity of five kilos of food grains per individual per month at a fixed price of Rs 1 to Rs 3 a kilo through ration shops.

The bill goes further than what the public distribution system (PDS) now provides by giving food grains cheap and by taking the individual as the basis for deciding the quantity of food grains given.

 

The bill in its latest avatar – it has undergone numerous changes ever since it was first tabled in parliament on December 2011 –will provide 5 kilograms of either wheat or rice or coarse cereals per person per month at Rs 3 per kilogram for rice, Rs 2 per kilogram for wheat and Rs 1 per kilogram for coarse cereals.

Apart from that the bill will also provide legal entitlement for subsidized grains or allowance to a host of other sections of the population like pregnant women, children and also poorest among the poor households, who would get 35 kilograms of grains per month also at a discounted price of 3, 2,1.

The bill in its current avatar – it was earlier proposed to give 7 kilograms of foodgrains to priority category households and 3-4 kilograms to general category households – will require an annual food subsidy of almost Rs 131,000 crore, which also includes almost 8,000 crore for other incidental expenditures like setting up National and State-Level Food Commission and grievance redressal mechanisms.

In, 2013-14 union budget, the government allocated Rs 90,000 crore as food subsidy, of which Rs 10,000 crore was solely on account of the NFSB.

The bill does not provide for mandatory reforms in the public distribution system to make it leakage proof though an earlier version sought reforms as a pre-condition.

The Chattisgarh government has already passed its own version of a Food Security Act which takes beneficiaries as households rather than individuals and makes a blanket provision of 35 kilos per family.

The state went through a preliminary process of cleansing of the distribution channels before it passed the Act.
 
The central bill does not provide clear criteria for the identification of priority and general Households and leaves it to the states to fix the criteria.

However the Centre is to determine the state-wise distribution of priority and general households, and to notify “guidelines for identification of priority households, general households and exclusion criteria”.

The central bill also does not have provisions for grievance redressal mechanism or for transparency.