In a right-to-development approach, citizens are given some basic rights by the government of the country. One such right is freedom from hunger, which has prompted the move towards a Food Security Act. Various people have debated and discussed what an appropriate approach for such an Act should be and the National Advisory Council (NAC) has put up a draft Bill on its website. I have read the draft and am a bit worried about whether it will solve our problems of hunger and starvation.
The first thing that bothers me is the gap between the philosophy of the rights approach and what the proposed Act is trying to do. The right to freedom from hunger is a right of every citizen, regardless of class, colour, creed, community and, of course, gender. If, as a society, we accept this, one would expect the Act to operationalise this in a way that ensures that there is nobody, rich and poor alike, who wants food but is unable to get it. However, the NAC draft starts with who are eligible and who are not! And so, we have a priority group, a general group and an excluded group. In other words, we are treating the right to freedom from hunger very differently from, say, a citizen’s right to security. Imagine if we had a police system that said that basic law and order would be maintained at a low cost (even free) for very poor citizens and the very rich, or the excluded group, will have to buy security at market prices! It sounds ridiculous when we put it this way, but if we want to have a Food Security Act then we should be thinking about what we are trying to do in a more appropriate way. Otherwise, we can make such laws every time we want to do something and redraft every policy into an Act. In other words, our current approach is diluting the significance of the concept of freedom from hunger.
Of course, the draft Bill describes the three groups for the purpose of operationalising food security through the public distribution system and it does not say that the excluded group does not have the right to freedom from hunger. So, my criticism may sound a bit forced. But, as I demonstrated with the example about the police, giving differential access to the police force for different groups of people is, indeed, similar to what is being proposed here for food security.
Historically, the public distribution system was for food security and everyone was given access to the system; recall that at one time everyone got a ration card and could lift from ration shops whatever they were entitled to, without having to prove how rich they were. The concept of having different entitlements for those above and below the poverty line is a much more recent phenomenon.
The second problem I have with the draft Bill is that it tells us how exactly to implement this. In other words, the state and central governments will not only have to ensure that there is food security but they will also have to make sure that it will be done through a revamped public distribution system in which procurement is decentralised. In other words, it not only enacts an outcome, it also enacts the process by which to reach the outcome. What if some large cities do so effectively through food stamps or cash transfers? Going back to the issue of general security, this is tantamount to specifying the rules and regulations of the state police forces, how the police should be recruited and how each police station should function being written down in a central Act. This reminds me of the compulsory use of CNG in commercial vehicles that became a part of the Delhi law (thanks to a court judgment). There, not only did the court manage to reduce pollution, it also said exactly how to do it. What happens if there is a better alternative than CNG to reduce pollution? How will that alternative be developed when the cost of introducing it includes the cost of having to change the law into allowing non-CNG alternatives? So, while the CNG Act reduced pollution in Delhi, it also reduced the incentives to develop better alternatives to reduce pollution.
The approach here is very similar to what we did before 1991. Using our knowledge and understanding, we bind ourselves to do the right thing. What we forget to take stock of is that our knowledge is restricted to what we know and understand today. How do we account for what we will know tomorrow? How will we experiment with new things? During our “planning” phase, we had brilliant experts explaining what should be produced, how it should be produced, for whom it should be produced, and how this should be done. Instead of enabling change, we tried to mandate change and it did not work.
We have brilliant people in the NAC, and nobody doubts that. But I am unwilling to accept that theirs is the last word for all time to come. I do not doubt their scepticism about other known ways of implementing food security. However, I am sceptical about them deciding for future generations how food security is to be implemented. Enacting a process into law prevents changes in the process unless the law is amended. This hampers efficiency changes in processes. We thought like this during the license raj and it was a mistake as we now know. I do not see any reason not to learn from past mistakes.
The thinking behind the Food Security Act shows that we can be bold. The thinking behind its implementation should be equally bold and more enabling.
The authors is research director, India Development Fund