Half-baked idea

Distributing livestock products through PDS is impractical

The proposal to subsidise protein-rich foods such as meat, fish, chicken and eggs for supply through the public distribution system (PDS) being considered by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog, seems outright utopian. No doubt, the need to promote the intake of protein-rich food cannot be disputed as four out of every 10 children in India are undernourished. But disbursal of highly perishable stuff through the vast PDS network for this purpose seems imprudent. These food items require constant refrigeration, which cannot be ensured in over 500,000 ration shops, spread across the country, including the areas where power supply is erratic. Equipping all these fair price shops with the special paraphernalia and infrastructure needed to dispense non-vegetarian items is logistically unmanageable and financially burdensome. Any compromise on food quality is bound to cause health hazards, defeating the very purpose of this move. The food subsidy, which already exceeds Rs 1.84 trillion (Budget 2019-20), would have to be scaled up massively to bring these high-priced foods within the economic reach of the poor. What is worse, even if the government manages to muster the needed resources, the desired objective of eradicating malnourishment may still not be fully served because a sizable section of the population is compulsively vegan who may not eat livestock products even if given free.  

However, there is no dearth of nutritious, yet cost-effective and easy-to-handle, alternatives to the livestock products for distribution through the PDS. Pulses and millets stand out among these. Leguminous grains, grown widely in the country, can potentially wipe out protein deficiency if these can be brought within the economic reach of the poor. Their production needs to be stepped up to generate surplus for supplying through the PDS. The extent of subsidy required for pulses would be only a fraction of what is needed for the livestock products.  Millets, now rechristened as nutri-cereals, are the other strong contenders for a place in the PDS on the merit of their nutritional value. These small-seeded cereals, including pearl millet (bajra), sorghum (jowar), finger millet (ragi) and others, are the storehouses of nutrients, especially the micro-nutrients, which fine grains such as rice and wheat lack. These have, in fact, been a regular part of people’s diet prior to the availability of subsidised fine grains. Their health benefits have recently been revalidated through a millet-feeding study on school children in Karnataka. Conducted by the Hyderabad-based International Crops Research Institute for Semi-arid Tropics and a non-governmental organisation, Akshaya Patra, this study has indicated that replacement of rice with millets in the mid-day meals improved children’s growth by 50 per cent.

The popularity of millets as health foods is growing rapidly the world over. The Indian government, too, is not unaware of their nutritional worth. In fact, it had declared 2018 as the year of the millets. The minimum support prices of millet crops, too, were increased substantially to incentivise production. But the next logical step of lending the needed marketing support through procurement and dispensing them through the PDS is still awaited. It would be far better for the NITI Aayog to concentrate on promoting nutrient-dense products like pulses and millets to alleviate rampant malnutrition rather than brooding over ways and means of distributing livestock products through the PDS.