 "India's fight for food security at WTO")
A recent study of India’s expanded food transfer programme, the National Food Security Act (NFSA), has found that it has prevented nearly 1.8 million children from being stunted, helped raise wage incomes and improved dietary diversity.
India’s public distribution system (PDS) was expanded under the NFSA in 2013 and further consolidated after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic as part of the Prime Minister’s Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) in 2020.
Authored by Kathy Baylis of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Ben Crost of the University of Calgary; and the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore’s Aditya Shrinivas, the study, The Wide-Ranging Benefits of India's Public Distribution System, has found that the NFSA “significantly reduced stunting among children aged 0–5 years”.
“For instance, the average PDS expansion led to a 7.2 percentage point reduction in stunting prevalence. These effects were most pronounced in children aged 0–2 years, a critical window during which a child’s development is highly sensitive to nutritional intake,” the study said.
The PDS primarily subsidises staple grains, but the researchers found that PDS transfers improved dietary diversity by ‘crowding in’ the consumption of nutrient-dense foods, particularly animal proteins such as milk and meat. “This shift is likely explained by reduced out-of-pocket spending on staple foods, which frees up household food budgets for higher-quality, nutrient-dense foods,” the authors have argued.
The PDS transfers lead to an increase in the share of the food budget spent on animal proteins while decreasing the share spent on grains. “The resulting increase in animal protein intake is large enough to account for the observed reduction in stunting, consistent with well-established evidence in nutritional science,” the authors have said.
Another gain from PDS transfers is the increased daily wages and total wage income, improving the welfare of poor households who are typically net labour suppliers, the research said. These additional ‘second-round’ effects may also partly explain the large effect of food transfers on stunting in our context, the authors have stated.
The research has said the effect of PDS transfers on child stunting was particularly large during years with low rainfall. These results suggest that a nutrition-sensitive safety net like the PDS supports food security, making child nutrition outcomes less vulnerable to local climate shocks, the authors have contended.
To understand the challenge that India’s food programme faces, an estimated 150 million children under five are stunted globally. India accounts for a massive 30 per cent of the total. Within India, 36 per cent—or more than a third—of young children are stunted. India’s PDS is the world’s largest food transfer programme. It provides highly subsidised cereals through a network of more than half a million (537,000) ‘fair price shops’.
The NFSA, introduced in 2013, standardised entitlement quantities and prices, mandating the provision of 5 kilograms of staple grains per person per month at a price of no more than Rs 3 per kg for rice and Rs 2 per kg for wheat. Prior to NFSA, states and Union Territories decided the prices and quantities they offered to PDS beneficiaries.
Once the central law fixed a uniform price and quantity, all states had to align with the new minimum mandate. It also meant that the shift from per-household to per-individual entitlements benefitted larger families. Households with ration cards experienced substantial gains, while non-eligible households serve as an internal ‘control’ group, the study noted.
The researchers factored in the variation in entitlements and constructed a precise measure of PDS transfer value before and after NFSA. They estimated the impact of PDS transfers on child nutrition using individual-level data from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) Village Dynamics in South Asia dataset, which covers 30 villages across eight states from 2010 to 2015.
“Our results have important implications for the policy debate around the effectiveness of food transfers. Critics often argue that food transfer programmes suffer from inefficiencies, poor targeting and promote 'empty calories'. However, our results reject these criticisms for the case of India’s PDS,” the authors have stated.
They have said that they found the expansions in India’s PDS that followed NFSA effectively reached the intended beneficiaries and had large positive impacts in their study sample. PDS transfers improved dietary diversity and increased labour incomes. “Our back-of-the-envelope calculations that extrapolate our estimates to the aggregate level suggest that the PDS expansions from NFSA prevented approximately 1.8 million children from being stunted,” the researchers have said.
