Food Insecurity Bill by Pratap Bhanu Mehta

The government believes it is more important to be seen to be doing things than to be doing them well. The proposed food security legislation is another example of this tendency. The legislation exemplifies the self-defeating obduracy of bureaucratic modes of thinking. But the debate around it also exemplifies a failure of intellectual argument in India. Our debates often have this character. First, we spend a lot more time arguing about the destination than necessary. It is absolutely unconscionable that the need for a credible food security system still needs to be argued. Then we have a slightly more productive discussion about the route to get there. Some will argue that the Public Distribution System, though currently broken, can be fixed. Others will argue we need to replace food with cash. Sometimes these debates are in good faith. But sometimes in these debates, as in identity politics, belief chases evidence, not the other way round. But once we have, for good or for ill, chosen a route, we stop caring whether we will drive well enough to get to the destination. Or, worse still, we will actively subvert whatever route has been chosen. Often this is because each side can say, “I told you PDS won’t work.” Or, “I told you private provisioning won’t work.” We make sure that the conditions that might make the chosen architecture work do not obtain. But here is where a little generosity may help. It is possible to say: We should have chosen a different route. But now that we have chosen this route, let us ask how we can gain most from it. Like politicians, our debates are more interested in scoring points, than making progress.

The debate about the architecture of food security is important. Given the realities of procurement, and the unconscionable deprivation on the ground, PDS is probably still a workable bet. But both PDS supporters and sceptics ought to join forces in recognising that the current bill needs revision, from within its own paradigm. It has a few promising features. But its approach to PDS lacks the central element of good legislation: integrity. A scheme must be a good-faith effort to implement what has a high probability of working, than to continue with premises you know will fail. The one thing that there is near consensus on is this: the more a scheme relies on complex targeting, the more likely it is to fail. Even with the latest, Janani Suraksha Yojana, there is evidence that states which universalised it had greater gains than states which had targeting. Universality or self-targeting is not a sufficient condition for a scheme’s success. But it seems to be one of the conditions of making success possible. You can do clear exclusions of the very privileged. But the numbers involved are so small that the gains are not clear.

But what does the new legislation do? It creates Orwellian categories like priority households and general category households. And it introduces more forms of differential pricing.In short, it wilfully incorporates into its design three features that have made schemes in the past a failure: impractical targeting categories, administrative complexity, and incentives to game. It almost reads like a set-up. Instead, it would be far better to do what Jean Dreze has proposed: keep the scheme simple. It will have more integrity and chance of success. Exclude those who come under the unambiguous automatic exclusion criteria, if you must. But keep one category of beneficiaries, and a standard amount of 25 kilograms. And keep the one scheme that has worked relatively better: Antyodaya.

The point about administrative simplicity is not peripheral to design; it is central to it. The BPL lists have been such a moral and administrative travesty. One of the ironies of the Indian system is that subsidies that benefit the privileged, like fuel subsidies, are couched in universalistic terms. But those from which the poor benefit are always targeted. This is doubly insulting to the poor. It makes it sound as if what the poor are getting is some special dispensation rather than a right enjoyed by all. But after all the fiascos with classification, it will take a psychoanalyst to diagnose why the Indian state continues to reinstate untenable categories. Perhaps it is more interested in defining the poor than helping them.

The second aspect of integrity is this: if the objective is important, then we find the means to achieve it, instead of letting false assumptions about means to achieve the ends guide formulation of ends. The ministry of agriculture and the Planning Commission have consistently let some warped sense of means subvert the achievement of ends. They are not interested in food security or nutrition. They are interested in classifications, poverty caps, export prices, etc. Some of these concerns are well placed. It is vital that any procurement scheme must not diminish incentives for farmers. But not a single one of those proposing universalisation or near-universalisation, like Abhijit Sen, Himanshu or Jean Dreze, is exceeding reasonable procurement targets. There is something seriously amiss when we suggest with a straight face that we don’t have the money or the grain to guarantee food security.

A government, planning wizard that it is, also has to plan for what it cannot do. So in case the government cannot give you food it will give food security wages instead. It is hard to know what to make of this idea: it introduces cash by the backdoor. Whether it is a good idea cannot be debated. But something about elementary political economy tells you that if you introduce cash in a scheme not designed for it, the incentives to game the system increase dramatically.

The bill gives you the impression that it will create the worst of all worlds. It will increase expenditure. But the administrative imagination that has gone into it will ensure that the outcomes are deeply disappointing. It is almost as if someone in government is saying, if you make me do PDS, I will domybest to ensure it does not work. In intellectual debates we will use this as a pretext to say public or private cannot work. And politicians, typically, think the politics of being seen with the poor is one thing, wrestling with the administrative protocols that have imprisoned the poor quite another. As a society we disagree on many things. But it will be a travesty if we cannot agree that our failures on food security are not a tragedy, they are a scandal.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi