How to exclude

Change the way food security Act beneficiaries are identified

Of the hurdles that prevented many states from implementing the National Food Security Act and forced the Centre to extend the deadline by three months, the most formidable are identification of targeted beneficiaries and the revamping of infrastructure for delivering food efficiently and without leakages. Identification has been left to the states without any criteria or guidelines; the Centre has fixed only the caps on the total number of beneficiaries in each state. The law has done away with the categorisation of people as below poverty line (BPL) or above poverty line (APL). This has given considerable leeway to the state governments to include and exclude households from this programme. Well-chosen norms are, therefore, necessary to stave off misuse of a programme that might cost about Rs 1 lakh crore annually. The task would be more difficult for states that claim higher poverty ratios than what has been reckoned by the Centre for coverage under the food law – for instance, Bihar – or those that have a huge number of fake BPL ration cards — as, reportedly, in Karnataka, where the number of registered beneficiaries is supposedly higher than the state’s population.

Traditionally, income and nutrition have been used to determine households’ eligibility for access to cheap food. But they lead to large-scale inclusion and exclusion errors, since they are difficult to authenticate. In contrast, easily verifiable socio-economic parameters – the ownership of physical assets, such as land or large pucca houses, motorbikes or cars – are more reliable indicators. Households with such assets could be kept out of the purview of this law. The underlying idea, after all, is to exclude about one-third of the households belonging to the upper socio-economic strata from this programme.

Apart from this, since about 60 million tonnes of foodgrain – each kilogram effectively costing more than Rs 20 – are to be doled out at highly subsidised rates of merely Rs 3 a kg for rice, Rs 2 for wheat and Rs 1 for coarse grains, the delivery system has to be efficient and pilferage-proof. The present public distribution system (PDS) does not reach rural and interior areas well enough. These are precisely where those Indians live who need subsidised food the most. This infrastructure, therefore, needs to be expanded and modernised. Total computerisation of food-handling and distribution operations and social auditing of the fair price shops might impart a much-needed transparency to this system. The scope for diversion of cheaper grains to the market – as is happening on a sizable scale at present – needs to be curbed. One way of doing so is to deliver the grains at the doorsteps of fair price shops and monitor the movement of vehicles carrying PDS grains through satellite-based geographical positioning system. Several states have begun doing so with satisfactory results. The others can also gainfully do so.