Leaving no poor person behind
Jean Drèze
The National Food Security Act is finally making headway in the poorest States. Amplified by reforms in the Public Distribution System, a modicum of nutritional support and economic security to all vulnerable households is now a real possibility.
Dhobargram is a small Santhal village in Bankura district of West
Bengal, with 100 households or so. Most of them are poor, or even very
poor, by any plausible standard. There are also some relatively well-off
households — they are not rich, but they have things like concrete
houses and motorcycles, often thanks to a permanent job in the public
sector. Should this small minority of better-off households be excluded
from the Public Distribution System (PDS)? Including them costs public
money, and they are not at risk of undernourishment. On the other hand,
weeding them out is a major headache, as West Bengal and neighbouring
states are discovering in the course of implementing the National Food
Security Act (NFSA). Also, excluding them creates a small but powerful
group of disgruntled people who may be tempted to sabotage the PDS in
one way or another. When they are included, there is greater pressure on
the system to work.
Improved framework
Jean Drèze
This is just one village (selected at random), but Dhobargram
illustrates the major gains that are possible if the NFSA is well
implemented in the poorer States. These gains are amplified by PDS
reforms, a mandatory adjunct of the Act. The PDS in West Bengal has been
one of the worst in the country for a long time. Today, it is
undergoing reforms similar to those that have been so successful in
Chhattisgarh and were also adopted with good effect by neighbouring
States such as Odisha and Madhya Pradesh. Hopefully, they will work in
West Bengal too.
None of this is to say that all is well in West Bengal, or even just in
Dhobargram. Some poor households in Dhobargram are off the list of
ration cards, possibly because the SECC missed them, or because they
were formed after 2011, or for some other reason. There are many cases
of ration cards with missing household members (this matters since PDS
entitlements are defined in per capita terms under the NFSA). Also, the
new list of ration cards includes fewer Antyodaya households than the
old list, a problem that has also emerged in other States. It will take
skilful revision of the NFSA list to resolve these problems. But at
least the NFSA has created a relatively sound framework within which
this can be done.
Winds of change
Judging from brief enquiries in Jharkhand and Odisha, which are also in
the process of rolling out the NFSA, there are similar developments
there. The biggest challenge, responsible for the delayed rollout of
NFSA in many States, is to identify eligible households. Even with
near-universal coverage (86 per cent in rural Jharkhand and 82 per cent
in rural Odisha), this is a daunting task. Jharkhand adopted much the
same approach as West Bengal: an initial list of ration cards was
prepared from SECC data (by removing better-off households), and later
revised based on people’s complaints. The main problem with this
approach is exclusion errors: there are gaps and mistakes in the SECC
data, not always corrected by the complaints process. Odisha followed a
different approach, based on self-declaration: ration card applicants
had to certify that they met the eligibility criteria, and local
functionaries were asked to verify their declarations. The main problem
here seems to be inclusion errors: well-off households often get away
with claiming that they meet the criteria. The self-declaration approach
also requires a reliable administrative machinery — I doubt that it
would have worked in Bihar or Jharkhand.
It is too early to tell which of these approaches is preferable. There
are also alternatives, such as Madhya Pradesh’s pioneering attempt to
link the PDS with a database of local residents (the Samagra register)
maintained by gram panchayat functionaries. And of course, one can take
the view that it is simply not worth taking all this trouble to exclude
10 or 20 per cent of rural households — universalisation is best, at
least in the poorer States. What is clear is that we can do much better
today than in the old days of “BPL surveys”. Among other remarkable
improvements is the transparency of the entire process. Even in
Jharkhand, the list of NFSA ration cards is available on the Net in a
reader-friendly format, with all requisite details. That makes it a lot
harder to cheat — gone are the days when the village head dished out BPL
cards to his or her friends without any risk of scrutiny.
The effects of PDS reforms have also started showing in the poorer
States. Recent surveys in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh point to remarkable
improvements in the last few years. There is no reason why the NFSA
latecomers (Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam, among others) should fail to
bring about similar change. Some of them, notably Odisha, actually
initiated the process of PDS reform much before rolling out the NFSA,
with very positive results. The laggards have their work cut out.
Looking forward
The picture emerging from recent research is quite different from the
impression conveyed by media reports. The latter tend to focus on abuses
and irregularities: for instance, the story of a wealthy mayor in
Odisha who bagged a ration card, or of someone in Jharkhand who found
that 366 ration cards had “inadvertently” been printed in his name. It
is certainly part of the media’s job to highlight these anomalies, but
the larger picture tends to get lost in the process. There is an urgent
need for careful evaluations of the impact of NFSA in different States.
Looking ahead, all eyes are on Uttar Pradesh, one of the last States to
implement the NFSA. With a foodgrain allocation of 10 million tonnes or
so, and a very restrictive PDS under the old system, Uttar Pradesh has
more to gain from the NFSA than any other State. But it is also one of
India’s worst-governed States, if not the worst. Tremendous resolve will
be required to break the nexus of corrupt middlemen who have milked the
PDS in Uttar Pradesh for so many years (mainly under the APL quota,
which is all set to be phased out). As election time approaches, it may
just happen — that would be a victory of sorts, not only for food
security but also for the battle against corruption.
Finally, it is important to remember that the NFSA is not restricted to
the PDS. Other critical components include maternity entitlements,
brazenly ignored by the Central government ever since the Act came into
force. The PDS itself need not be confined to NFSA entitlements: in
several States, some households are now eligible for subsidised pulses
and edible oil as well. Perhaps for the first time, there are real
possibilities of ensuring a modicum of nutritional support and economic
security to all vulnerable households.
(Jean Dreze is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University.)
